Social and Physical Activity to the Healthy Ageing in the Policies

Improving health, to increase life expectancy, is a fundamental part of an individual’s existence. Health is a complex concept, the protection of which must be framed within a vast interdependence of subjective and objective factors. The challenges to be adopted, to ensure healthy living conditions, have led the scientific community and stakeholders to reason around a vast array of elements. What emerges from these reflections is that it may be useful both to incentivize public policies that emphasize new ways of promoting health and to support educational processes that look at the assumption of a correct lifestyle. In relation to the increasingly ageing world population, health is not exclusively a political issue, but is linked to the biographical experiences of the individual. Individuals take personal responsibility for their needs at the various stages of life, since neither public policies nor medicine alone can promote the achievement of an overall state of well-being. Improving the quality of life and psycho-physical well-being of the elderly represent some of the most important social and cultural challenges of our time. Old age is a population-wide process, maximizing the potential of old age means enabling the elderly to live fulfilling lives, also challenging the stereotypes of ageism. What the contribution aims to do is to empirically analyze, with the use of SHARE data, the relationship between physical activity - one of the most important determinants of lifestyle health - and perceived health among subjects of different age groups - with reference to the elderly. The analysis will be conducted on a model that considers several indicators such as age, socio-economic status (SES), gender, etc., which will allow for a greater understanding of the relevance or otherwise of physical activity for the attainment of well- being and good health.