The tenth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Gostin’s seminal treatise Global Health Law affords us the opportunity to reflect on his enduring legacy as a preeminent scholar, and one of the field’s founding thought leaders.

Over the last three years, Larry Gostin, I, and many others have urged world leaders to open their minds toward specific subsets of reform in the interest of pandemic response, including mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and, crucially, financial buy-in. With negotiations for a new pandemic accord still incomplete, our focus must remain on reaching global agreement, and keeping at top of mind the immense stakes if that is not possible.

Systems thinking is deeply rooted in history, as far back as Aristotle. However, it has only relatively recently reemerged as an approach to help us understand and intervene in health and food systems. This is particularly salient, given its impact on environmental and population health. Whilst global food is abundant, many people cannot access affordable, healthy and culturally appropriate food. On the other hand, foods of low nutrient density are widely available. Food systems are complex and require complex thinking and approaches that allow us to consider the influence of multiple factors and how the might system respond to change. In turn, this enables the identification of ‘leverage’ points, where policies or interventions are most likely to have a sustained impact. The Foresight obesity map inspired others to adopt systems approaches to help understand the broader social, economic, environmental determinants of obesity to support intervention/policy development. Evaluation of these requires a consideration of complexity to explore why intervention goals may or may not have been successful and how relationships between components or approaches can be enhanced to support implementation and thereby increase the potential for effectiveness. Overall, approaches to understand, intervene, govern and evaluate food systems must themselves be sufficiently complex, or will ultimately be destroyed by the system it seeks to improve. This review paper aims to introduce readers to the application of systems approaches in research within the context of food systems and health, including its traditional/historical origins.

There is mounting interest in the dual health and environmental benefits of plant-based diets. Such diets prioritise whole foods of plant origin and moderate (though occasionally exclude) animal-sourced foods. However, the evidence base on plant-based diets and health outcomes in Australasia is limited and diverse, making it unsuitable for systematic review. This review aimed to assess the current state of play, identify research gaps, and suggest good practice recommendations. The consulted evidence base included key studies on plant-based diets and cardiometabolic health or mortality outcomes in Australian and New Zealand adults. Most studies were observational, conducted in Australia, published within the last decade, and relied on a single dietary assessment about 10–30 years ago. Plant-based diets were often examined using categories of vegetarianism, intake of plant or animal protein, or dietary indices. Health outcomes included mortality, type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome. While Australia has an emerging and generally favourable evidence base on plant-based diets and health outcomes, New Zealand’s evidence base is still nascent. The lack of similar studies hinders the ability to judge the overall certainty of evidence, which could otherwise inform public health policies and strategies without relying on international studies with unconfirmed applicability. The proportional role of plant- and animal-sourced foods in healthy, sustainable diets in Australasia is an underexplored research area with potentially far-reaching implications, especially concerning nutrient adequacy and the combined health and environmental impacts.

This article explores the evolving rhetoric of commercial whaling advocates in Japan and Norway, who frame whaling as essential for global, national, and personal health. I show that proponents leverage sustainability discourse and health narratives to present whaling as beneficial for marine ecosystems, national food security, and individual well-being. By coopting the language of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and casting whaling as “healthy,” the whaling industry and its backers challenge the anti-whaling hegemony, portraying it as irrational and unscientific. While the alleged environmental benefits of whaling have been significant to the rhetorical arsenal of the industry since at least the 1990s, a growing emphasis on the personal health benefits of whalemeat suggests the opening of a new front in struggles to influence public opinion.

This article draws on fieldwork among patients pursuing healing using macrobiotic diets at a Buddhist temple clinic not far from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It examines the (re-)emergence of macrobiotic diets as a movement for “nurturing life” (duõng sinh) in modeern Vietnam. By examining the use of macrobiotic diets among this temple's patients and followers, the article unravels popular discourses of food and health, and their intertwining relationships with conceptions of chronic diseases in contemporary Vietnamese society. The popularity of this temple as an alternative therapeutic centre for people with chronic conditions also sheds light on notions of illness, healing processes, and religious beliefs. The rise of macrobiotics as an alternative diet and lifestyle reveals people's uncertainties and mistrust amid many prevalent problems in contemporary Vietnam, such as food safety concerns. Altogether, “nurturing life” activities offer strategies for individuals to adapt to a rapidly changing social context.

The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from economic experiments with preschoolers and their mothers to investigate whether child health can explain developmental gaps in children's non-cognitive skills. Our measure for children's non-cognitive skills is their willingness to compete with others. Our findings suggest that health problems are negatively related to children's willingness to compete and that the effect of health on competitiveness differs with socioeconomic background. Health has a strongly negative effect in our sub-sample with low socio-economic background, whereas there is no effect in our sub-sample with high socio-economic background.

Despite public health efforts, uptake of preventive health technologies remains low in many settings. In this paper, we develop a formal model of prevention and test it through a laboratory experiment. In the model, rational agents decide whether to take up health technologies that reduce, but do not eliminate the risk of adverse health events. As long as agents are sufficiently risk averse and priors are diffuse, we show that initial uptake of effective technologies will be limited. Over time, the model predicts that take-up will decline as users with negative experiences revise their effectiveness priors towards zero. In our laboratory experiments, we find initial uptake rates between 65 and 80% for effective technologies with substantial declines over time, consistent with the model’s predictions. We also find evidence of decision-making not consistent with our model: subjects respond most strongly to the most recent health outcomes, and react to negative health outcomes by increasing their willingness to invest in prevention, even when health risks without prevention are known by all subjects. Our findings suggest that high uptake of preventive technologies should only be expected if the risk of adverse health outcomes without prevention is high, or if preventive technologies are so effective that the risk of adverse outcomes is negligible with prevention.

Following inter-/transdisciplinary ideas, environmental education inherently collaborates with other subjects, including physical education. As the work with other subjects might be jeopardised by differing worldviews and paradigms, it is worth illuminating compatible and incompatible positions for inter-/transdisciplinary work. In physical education, the concept of physical literacy (PL) has recently gained considerable attention and adopts a student-centred perspective on human existence and learning. Therefore, the goal of the present narrative integrative review was to review the existing literature at the nexus between physical education and environmental education through a PL lens (five pre-defined concept assumptions). After screening for eligibility, a total of 129 articles were assigned to five different thematic categories: (a) conceptual discussion/argumentative patterns, (b) curricular discussion and international comparisons, (c) programming/intervention content, (d) teacher and enabler perspectives and (e) student outcomes/perspectives. The synthesis revealed that PL can harmonise with the educative work when respecting the disciplinary interests of both physical education and environmental education. However, few intervention studies translate the holistic PL claims into interventions. Accordingly, evaluations with teachers or students less frequently integrated holistic learning experiences in line with PL. In summary, previous research at the nexus has not yet exhausted its full inter-/transdisciplinary potential.

Raymond Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to the residual form, underpins experiences of deindustrialization in the embodiment of industry, gendering identities, and community values. This is a complex relationship between work, health, community and culture, where working life reached beyond the coalface. This article analyzes the significance of these interconnecting factors through the oral history accounts of former miners and residents within the Kent Coalfield. In drawing on Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to “residual culture,” it reveals how ill-health was seen as “remarkable” and “traumatic,” yet equally “unremarkable” and “normal.” Having recognized the expectant inevitability of these issues, the discussion focuses on a particular understanding of community culture, social interactions and memories within the context of health and illness, which highlights the centrality embodiment in understanding deindustrialization as a process of change.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the gap in age-adjusted mortality rates between people living in Republican and Democratic counties expanded; people in Democratic counties started living longer. This paper argues that political partisanship poses a direct problem for ameliorating these trends: trust and adherence in one’s personal doctor (including on non-COVID-19 related care) – once a non-partisan issue – now divides Democrats (more trustful) and Republicans (less trustful). We argue that this divide is largely a consequence of partisan conflict surrounding COVID-19 that spilled over and created a partisan cleavage in people’s trust in their own personal doctor. We then present experimental evidence that sharing a political background with your medical provider increases willingness to seek care. The doctor-patient relationship is essential for combating some of society’s most pressing problems; understanding how partisanship shapes this relationship is vital.