Healthy Aging and the Environment Initiative
AARP’s Green Blog's current post on breast cancer includes avoiding toxicants as a strategy for future health. This new AARP blog is helping to bring environmental health information to AARP’s 35 million members. Check it out and post your comments!
 Healthy Aging and the Environment: A Pocket Guide. A 16-page illustrated guide to environmental factors that influence health across the lifespan, and how you can help make healthier choices and policies for all.
In the next few decades the number of Americans over 65 will nearly double and they will likely face increased diseases and disabilities unless we prioritize disease prevention across the lifespan.
Environmental factors that affect health include the natural, built, food, chemical, psychosocial and socioeconomic environments. Interventions that address the environmental origins of many diseases can be designed to promote health and also benefit ecosystems. The scientific report Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging describes how modifiable environmental factors are key drivers in today's chronic diseases. It explores how these factors interact with the biology of inflammation, oxidative stress, and insulin signaling to promote diseases of the aging such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s - as well as the “Western Disease Cluster,” including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, themselves risk factors for neurodegeneration.
And, how these diseases are being driven by dramatic changes over the past century in the food, built, and chemical environments among others.
View release on The Today Show on MSNBC website.
Goals of the Initiative
CHE’s Healthy Aging and the Environment Initiative builds on the seminal work instigated by the Healthy Aging publication and continues to develop a set of “ecological” or "systems' approaches to healthy aging.
We have created multiple educational materials that can be downloaded, and have presented at over 100 professional meetings and conferences. We are engaging with people at multiple levels of society and organizations that find common cause with our work, including those focusing on health throughout life as well as decision makers in government, business, and communities. Through a multidisciplinary approach to healthy living, our overarching goal is to educate, inspire and help integrate environmental health principles into mainstream health care and society as a basic approach to promote lifelong health and wellbeing.
 At right: Ted Schettler, MD, MPH, presented on healthy aging and the environment at
the 2010 annual conference of Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance, Boston.
Slide, Audio and Video Presentations on Healthy Aging and the Environment
Environmental Drivers of Chronic Disease – based on the key findings of the Healthy Aging report - complete with references and speaker notes to enable others to share this information. Supported audio presentation by medical co-author Ted Schettler MD MPH.
Healthy People Healthy Planet – 3-part video series by Jill Stein MD – developed for the University of Maryland School of Nursing, and video taped as part of the Boston University Superfund Research Project’s Environmental Health Nursing Collaborative.
Visit our webpage where you can download the full report, report chapters and presentations.
Other recent presentations you can view include:
Ted Schettler MD MPH “Environment and Health: An Eco-Social Perspective” at the Univ. of MA/Lowell. Watch the video online here.
National Council of Churches webinar - Ted Schettler MD MPH, Maria Valenti - see the NCC website
Aging, Environmental Health, Disabilities 5-part Teleconference Series now archived at AAIDD's teleconference page for materials and recordings of the calls.
(L-R) Erin Boles, MA Breast Cancer Coalition, Cindy Luppi, Clean Water Action and (far right) Maria Valenti meet with Erika Paulhus, staff for Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, on safer chemicals issues
Maria Valenti coordinates CHE’s Healthy Aging and the Environment initiative. She helped develop and lead national environmental health programs for almost two decades at Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, including the Pediatric Environmental Health Toolkit endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and is a co-author of several major peer-reviewed environmental health publications including:
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