Health promotion refers to The process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, and thereby improve their health. This conception reflects the World Health Organization conception of health as "the extent to which an individual or group is able to realize aspirations and to satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment. This is a dynamic model, in which health is seen not only as a state, but as a resource for everyday life. It is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources as well as physical capacities.

Health promotion is a general concept, while illness prevention refers specifically to an illness or disease: "measures not only to prevent the occurrence of illness, such as risk factor reduction, but also to arrest its progress and reduce its consequences once established."

By comparison, health protection refers to ensuring safe food and water supplies, providing advice to national food and drug safety regulators, protecting people from environmental threats, and having a regulatory framework for controlling infectious diseases in place. Ensuring proper food handling in restaurants and establishing smoke-free bylaws are examples of health protection measures.

Health promotion includes strengthening the skills of individuals to encourage healthy behaviours and it also includes building the healthy social and physical environments to support these behaviours.

Health promotion is any combination of health education and related organizational, economic and political interventions designed to facilitate behavioral and environmental changes conducive to health.