Abstract
The helth promotion policy in Japan was based on 3 key health determinants: nutrition, exercise, and adequate rest. In this policy, health promotion concentrates on the physical aspects only. However, the WHO charter stresses the importance of social and mental determinants as well. In an attempt to determine awareness of people towards health determinants, we surveyed adult women using a simple questionnaire, asking "How do you take care of your health?" and "Please list your answers in your own words in order of recall ." In 1995, the questionnaire was given to 100 randomly selected adult women, aged 25-39, and 73 women responded, mentioning 3.7 items per person on average. In all 273 items that were mentioned, 46 independent or mutually nonoverlapped items were identified . Three key determinants occupied 74.0% of the total. This may indicate that these 3 were already adopted to all the people of Japan for their health care. All the responded items were classified into 8 health determinants: nutrition, exercise, adequate rest, psycho-social action, hygienic action, reqular daily activitiy, physiological demand, and health education. The frequency rate of the items in psycho-social action accounted for 14%, though they were not involved in official public health recommendations. The above results may help to stress the importance of public organizations to instigate a psycho-social health promotion policy to increase public awareness in Japan.
