NUTRITION education is a strategy that has been widely used for many years to promote healthy diets and thereby ensure proper growth of children, as well as reduction in all forms of malnutrition.
The basis of any nutrition education programme should be to encourage the consumption of a nutritionally adequate diet, promote healthy lifestyles and to stimulate an effective demand for appropriate foods.
In the past, people were instructed to eat foods that were good for them. Attempts were sometimes directed at making radical rather than gradual changes in the diets of the people who were the targets of nutrition education. In most circumstances, the nutrition education content must be formulated on the basis of a problem analysis. The education must be relevant to reality.
Inadequate intake of food by young children (energy deficiency) is mostly the main cause of malnutrition. Therefore, initial advice might be to feed a malnourished infant with the same food as before, but more frequently or to provide just a little more food. This advice should be more acceptable to parents than an attempt to make major, often unrealistic, changes in the diet. Other recommendations for change should be simple and feasible for the family, consistent with its cultural habits.
Nutrition education messages normally urge poor mothers to provide their children with meat or fish every day, one egg per day or three cups of milk per day. This advice may have been nutritionally reasonable, but in all other respects it may lack sense. Except in very few communities, poor families cannot afford to provide these foods to their young children so often. There should be other alternatives.
Nationally, several ministries (health, education, social, etc) and also various NGOs holding responsibility for nutrition education programmes should agree on common objectives, and each must decide how it plans to implement it. Factors that should be decided upon should include the content of the message, the target audience for the programme and the media to be used.
The choice of media depends on the formal and informal information and communications infrastructure of the area in question. In general, it is wise to use a combination of communications media in an integrated way. The efforts of the various agencies/organizations involved in nutrition education should be closely coordinated, so that the messages received from different sources will complement and reinforce each other.
The stress should be on small changes that will complement existing dietary practices and not on major changes. Failures tend to occur in campaigns that attempt to impart a mass of general information on nutrition, rather than hitting hard with a few well-designed messages in a limited number of priority areas.
Everyone who has the knowledge (for eg, members of health teams, schoolteachers) should provide nutrition education. They should do so at every possible opportunity (the doctor when treating a patient, the health nurse when visiting a home, the schoolteacher in a class or at a parents’ meeting). Every person in the country should be the target of nutrition education.
Nutrition educators have much more to learn from commercial advertising, that has often been successful in changing food habits and attitudes. Commercial promotion uses the media skillfully. The talent available in commerce should be harnessed more often to assist with nutrition and health education.
One approach that has been termed as “social marketing”, uses some principles from commercial marketing. In recent years, social marketing to promote improved health and better nutrition has been widely and successfully used. A major difference between traditional nutrition education and the newer approach is that the latter starts with what commercially is called “consumer research” that involves surveys and focus group interviews, what the consumer or the public is doing and why.
The newer approach uses consumer research to identify a few important problems such as decline in breastfeeding, infrequent meals or drinking contaminated water, and would then address them. The results of the research regarding consumer views, perspectives and practices lead to decisions on appropriate messages, communication techniques and targeting.
In the commercial world, test marketing is nearly always done before launching a product. It may also be sensible in nutrition education using social marketing and modern communication techniques; the message developed and the communication techniques chosen to tackle the problems assessed and analyzed may be tried out in a limited way before being implemented for a larger audience.
Nutrition education should be carried out broadly through schools, newspapers, television, radio and other mass media as well, as through face-to-face contact. To be most effective, communication experts need to be involved in the design of programmes.
The major nutritional problems can be categorized into those caused by insufficient intake of nutrients, which may be related to food insecurity, disease (specially infections) and/or lack of care; and those caused by excessive or unbalanced intake of food.
In the last decade lifestyles have changed, age-old social practices are disappearing and western diets and modern ways are replacing traditional ones. The prevention of malnutrition can be greatly assisted if people have accurate information on what constitutes a healthy diet and how they may best meet their nutritional needs. Key strategies to influence behaviour for improved nutrition should comprise dietary guidelines, food/nutrition labelling, ensuring consistent message, protecting traditional diets and nutrition training.
Public Nutrition Education is indispensable in the promotion of healthy diets and lifestyles. Adoption of certain food habits and behaviours without sufficient knowledge are detrimental to good health and nutrition. Advice/recommendations for nutritional change should be simple and feasible for the family, and consistent with cultural habits.
NUTRITION education is a strategy that has been widely used for many years to promote healthy diets and thereby ensure proper growth of children, as well as reduction in all forms of malnutrition.
