1. What Influences Your Health?
In this lesson, you will Learn About…
How heredity and environment affect your health.
Other factors that influence your health.

2. What Influences Your Health?
The Vocabulary terms in this lesson are:
Heredity.
Environment.
Culture.
Media.
Evaluate.
Click each term to display its definition.

3. What Affects Your Health?
Several factors affect your health:
Heredity
Environment
Family, culture, and friends
Media
Some of these factors are under your control, while others are not.
Making healthy choices means understanding and accepting what is beyond your control and making the most of those you can control.
Heredity is a factor that a person can’t control.
Environment is a factor over which people may have limited control.

4. Heredity
Heredity is the passing on of traits from biological parents to children.
Inherited traits are “built-in”— you can’t choose them or avoid them.
Inherited traits include skin, eye, and hair color, growth patterns; and the likelihood of getting certain diseases.
Recognizing inherited traits can help teens make important health decisions. For example, if family members tend to have many cavities, teens may need to pay special attention to their dental care.

5. Environment
The environment includes social and physical factors that affect individual and community health.
Examples of social environmental factors:
Access to education
Jobs
Presence of gang activity
Examples of physical environmental factors:
A person’s home, neighborhood, and school
Air and water
Climate
A teen may not be able to change his or her environment, but he or she can still make choices that can help maintain health. This involves recognizing the parts of the environment that might harm health, then taking steps to protect health.

6. Your Health Choices
Along with heredity and environment, several other aspects of your life influence your health and the health decisions that you make:
Family
Friends
Media

7. Family and Friends
Cultural factors can sometimes decrease or increase health risks. Some of your family traditions are part of your culture.
Your friends can also influence your decisions in either positive or negative ways.
Culture is the beliefs, customs, and traditions of a specific group of people.
Family traditions may influence, for example, the foods one eats, the holidays one celebrates, and goals one sets for oneself.
An example of how cultural traditions can increase health risks is a tradition that emphasizes eating high-fat and high-sugar foods. Ask volunteers to come up with an example of how cultural traditions can decrease health risks.
A friend who encourages you to participate in risky behavior has a negative influence on a person’s health; one who encourages you to engage in healthy behaviors has a positive impact.

8. The Influence of the Media
Media includes TV and radio, movies, books, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and the Internet.
Media and technology can influence health in both good and bad ways.
To be able to positively manipulate the information from media sources, you need to evaluate, or determine the quality of, everything you see and hear.
Media are the various methods of communicating information.
Media and technology can have both good and bad influences. For example, on the one hand, watching too much TV and not getting physical activity can create physical health problems for young people. On the other hand, media sources promote important health messages, such as antismoking campaigns, that help teens make wise choices. Evaluating media messages before following them can help teens make healthy choices.

9. Reviewing Terms and Facts
___________ is all the living and nonliving things that surround you.
Environment
Click to show the correct answer.

10. Reviewing Terms and Facts
Describe how you can use information about inherited traits to make health decisions.
Sample answer: Recognizing inherited traits can help one make important decisions about one’s health. For example, if members of a family tend to have many cavities, children can pay special attention to dental care.
Accept all reasonable responses.

11. Reviewing Terms and Facts
Identify three factors, other than heredity and physical environment, that can influence a person’s health.
Family
Friends
Media
Click to show the correct answer.

12. Reviewing Terms and Facts
A friend says, “ I don’t need to know about my family’s heath history because there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.” How might you respond?
Responses will vary, but should include the idea that steps could be taken to minimize the impact of inherited health risks.

13. Vocabulary Review
Heredity is the passing on of traits from biological parents to children.
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14. Vocabulary Review
Your environment is all the living and nonliving things that surround you.
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15. Vocabulary Review
Culture is the beliefs, customs, and traditions of a specific group of people.
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16. Vocabulary Review
Media are the various methods for communicating information.
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17. Vocabulary Review To evaluate something is to determine its quality.
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