Is Public Health Having an Existential Crisis?

Public health institutions are set up for communicable diseases, right there. They have seized on obesity because it's one of the few things that they feel like they can control. It allows them not to deal with these much thornier and much mor difficult issues. We get so attached to having these cultural conversations about health in a vacuum,. as if they are somehow uninfluenced by social or political or institutional dynamics. And actually, what the research shows is that our understandings of health are a direct result of those institutional and cultural and political factors.