Diet and Nutrition: Healthy and Sustainable Food Practices
Although this term has not been commonly used to describe health in years past, sustainable health is a growing movement. What is sustainable health you might ask? Well let’s break it down. Health can be defined as a state of “soundness of mind,” or more simply, a state of feeling good. The word sustainability describes the process by which something can be maintained or can keep going. Thus, sustainable health describes being in a state where you feel good not just once but over an extended period of time.
Today there are many ways to achieve sustainable health, one of the most popular being through the use and production of organic food products. Globally, organic agriculture has helped improve the biological health of human beings while maintaining the ecological ‘health’ of our environment.
Some of the major areas of interest surrounding sustainable health include: Food additives, animal welfare, biodiversity, community farming, genetic engineering, and pesticides.
As globalization continues to rapidly spread information around the world, youth are increasingly being exposed to unhealthy diets, which include diets that are high in saturated and trans fats and low in fruits, vegetables, and complex carbohydrates. Probably the most unsettling realities of unhealthy eating practices have been increased risk of diseases such as diabetes, heart failure, malnutrition, and obesity. The World Health organization (www.who.int) reported in 2006 that out of the 1.6 billion adults who were diagnosed as overweight, 400 million of those adults were simultaneously diagnosed as obese in both developed and developing countries.
Research studies in the area of health have shown that educating school-aged children and young people on healthy and sustainable nutritional habits, will increase the likelihood of those children and young people remaining healthy in the future regardless of socio-economic background. These educational programs not only teach nutrition, but they also teach youth how to prepare and handle food in safe and sustainable ways, achieve a balanced diet with limited resources, and to decrease their risk of acquiring a nutrition related disease or disorder. The Theory of Planned behaviour has been used by many research studies on nutrition to predict the factors that affect youth decision-making with regards to eating healthy. In a study by Lautenschlager and Smith (2007), researchers found that youth in a multicultural low-income community in the Unites States of America who participated in a 10-week program significantly improved in nutrition and eating habits. The success of the nutrition education program for multicultural youth identified several factors that were important to positively influencing the nutrition choices of young people, which includes: A nutrition and cooking curriculum that emphasized culturally diverse foods; participatory learning activities (role-playing), sustainable gardening lessons, in addition to skills to fight racism and poverty discrimination (care of the Youth Farm and Market Project, http://www.youthfarm.net). TPB model has also been used to help identify the ecological and cultural factors that affect indigenous youth in the Americas.
10 Tips to eating and maintaining sustainable health
1. Add a staple food (i.e. fruit, plantain/banana, maize/corn, rice, bread) to each meal.
2. Focus on foods that are high-fibre and low in saturated and trans fats to keep your heart nice and healthy
3. Drink plenty of water. Avoid drinking tea and coffee until 1-2 hours after a meal (when food will have left the stomach) to ensure the maximum amount of absorption of iron by the body supplied in our foods.
4. If you are a youth, you should include food options that are high in iron (especially young women) such as liver, dark green leaves, fish, red meat, and sorghum.
5. Aim for 3 meals and 3-6 snacks per day to create a healthy balance of all your dietary needs.
6. Avoid sugar-rich, sticky, salty, or processed foods and ingredients that are difficult to digest, inhibit healthy growth, and promote pre-mature aging.
7. Exercise regularly for at least 15 minutes at a time.
8. When you are sick, you can decrease the amount of time you remain sick by covering your mouth when you cough and washing your hands regularly.
9. Get lots of sleep, at least 8 hours of sleep every night, and take naps or siestas throughout the day.
10. Grow, buy, and eat food locally and organically to help your body and the environment.
Micronutrient malnutrition describes the plight of over 2 billion people worldwide (www.who.int) who in most cases do not receive enough foods, and in all cases, do not consume enough nutrients to characterize a healthy and balanced diet. Micronutrient malnutrition has had especially devastating effects for poor pregnant and nursing mothers, whose infants are often born and struggle to live with life-threatening cognitive impairments. Of course other factors besides food consumption play a factor in the persistence of this epidemic, such as: Increased population sizes, people living in poverty, lack of government and foreign aid, and ineffective food policies. The latter (i.e. food policies) has become the focus of many food and health organizations today who see the need for more policies that have in the past neglected to understand “health” in terms of sustainability. Now there is a call for more holistic policies that highlight the interdependent nature of health and sustainable agriculture practices.
Sustainable health is not just a personal choice; it’s a way for you to affect change in your community. Youth just like you are building sustainable food systems in their community just check out “The Food Project (www.thefoodproject.org)” for just one example of youth making a difference in the area of sustainable health.
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