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Health-Related Life Choices

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Life-Oriented Behavioral Research for Urban Policy

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Abstract

Health has been of growing interest for professionals in a variety of disciplines, including engineers and urban planners among many others. Urban and transport policies may be interlinked with health at many levels, directly or indirectly, because connections between life choices and health may be bidirectional. A healthy life means a balanced condition of not only physical health, but also mental and social health. However, existing studies have mainly focused on the physical health and ignored the mental and social aspects in people’s health-related quality of life (QOL). Therefore, this chapter makes a review of health behavior and health-related QOL with respect to health lifestyle habits, health promotion activities, active and non-active travel behavior (active travel refers to walking, bicycling and partially refers to use of transit systems), park usage, residential environment, and urban infrastructure. Lifestyle habits are reviewed by focusing on smoking, alcohol drinking, eating, sleeping, social contacts, and commuting, etc. Various future research issues are finally discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.alliance-healthycities.com/htmls/resources/index_resources.html (Accessed May 1, 2016).

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  1. Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan

    David Pérez Barbosa & Junyi Zhang

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  1. David Pérez Barbosa
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Correspondence to David Pérez Barbosa .

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  1. Hiroshima University , Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan

    Junyi Zhang

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Barbosa, D.P., Zhang, J. (2017). Health-Related Life Choices. In: Zhang, J. (eds) Life-Oriented Behavioral Research for Urban Policy. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56472-0_7

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