The 256-page report, Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health, shows how the conditions in which people live and work directly affects the quality of their health.

The "toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics is, in large measure, responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible," the report's authors wrote.

"Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale."

The report defines social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness.

In Canada, nearly 1.5 million people, mostly single mothers and children, lack decent family income, safe and affordable housing, suffer food insecurity and are vulnerable to violence, said the group's Canadian commissioner, Monique Bégin, a former federal health minister and a professor in the school of management at the University of Ottawa.

Canadians may be proud that the United Nations voted the country "the best country in the world in which to live" for seven years in a row, but not everyone shares equally in that high quality of life, Bégin said.