Health promotion has been defined by the
World Health Organization's (WHO) 2005
Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalized World as "the process of enabling people to increase control over their
health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health". The primary means of health promotion occur through developing healthy
public policy that addresses the prerequisites of health such as income, housing, food security, employment, and quality working conditions. More recent work has used the term
Health in All Policies to refer to the actions to incorporate health into all public policies. There is a tendency among
public health officials and governments—and this is especially the case in neoliberal nations such as Canada and the USA—to reduce health promotion to health education and
social marketing focused on changing behavioral risk factors.