Education Quote by Gro Harlem Brundtland

Policy disguised as public health advice: Brundtland’s sentence reads like a checklist, but it’s really a manifesto for how modern states try to move bodies as well as budgets. As a politician (and a figure associated with global health governance), she frames osteoporosis not as an individual misfortune or a purely medical problem, but as a population-level management issue. The condition becomes a rationale for building an infrastructure of persuasion and regulation that reaches from parliament all the way down to the dinner plate.

The intent is pragmatic: osteoporosis is expensive, chronic, and largely preventable, so prevention can’t be left to clinic visits and pamphlets. “Combination” is the key word; it signals an understanding that behavior change rarely happens because someone was told the right facts once. Legislative action sets defaults (food fortification, labeling, workplace and elder-care standards). Education supplies the narrative and vocabulary of risk. Health services operationalize it through screening and guidelines. Media coverage normalizes the desired choices and makes them socially legible. Individual counselling provides the personal hook that turns policy into habit.

The subtext is more politically charged: she’s quietly rejecting the libertarian fantasy that health is merely a private responsibility. At the same time, the breadth of the toolkit hints at the paternalism baked into “prevention”—a soft-power blend of nudges and mandates. In context, this reflects late-20th-century governance where aging populations and rising chronic disease pushed leaders to treat lifestyle as a public matter, turning bone density into a justification for coordinated, cross-sector control.