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Health is being able to function well – physically, mentally and emotionally. Hence to a great extent each individual can decide whether or not they are ‘healthy’. If they go about their daily activities normally, have an active role in their immediate surroundings and are mentally ‘content’, they are probably healthy. It is when we begin to add in extra parameters such as eating a certain kind of food or doing a particular fitness regime that the issue of health becomes more complicated. Too much information leads to distorting our ideas of what ‘healthy’ really is. Yet, I believe that even if a person eats his fair share of fried food and goes out dancing once a week and is in that able to function optimally and is happy, then he is healthy. He doesn't have to worry himself sick about his living choices.

Another aspect of this definition is the ‘absence or void of disease.’ This is slightly important to me because a person with say a certain kind of cancer could be doing all of the above but without his cancer being detected he will soon reach a stage where he is terminally ill. A dying person does not necessarily epitomise the best of health. Yet, to his mind he could be healthy, not knowing that he has a disease. It is at this point that I’d rather go with ‘knowledge and information’ than not.

Malli