Mission Nutrition

As we all know, the prevalence of obesity is rising among Canadian children due to unhealthy eating habits and inactivity. In nutrition month campaign dietitians of Canada focus on promoting healthy eating habits for school aged children and youth. Dietitians across Canada work closely with parents, teachers and caregivers as their play major role in influencing healthy habits in children. Surveys show, Major challenge is identified as having not enough time to prepare healthy meals and convenient of unhealthy drinks and snacks.
Dietitians of Canada in partnership with Kellogg Canada Inc initiated a program called mission nutrition. This campaign designed fun activities such as poster challenge award for student to creatively illustrate healthy eating and physical activity massage of Canada’s food guide and many easy to use lesson plans. They also encourage families’ participation in this initiative. They provide some guidelines for families to make healthy choices and teach them how to follow 5 steps to make a healthy living goal and set an action plan. Also educate parents about nutrition labelling to have wiser choices. Further the campaign give parents Family Healthy Eating Tool Kit to use it as their guideline and strategies for involving their children in the process of making healthy food choices.
I believe this campaign have an excellent approach in way that they have involved educators, parents as well as children. All activities designed to be a fun experience. Therefore it would be more practical and have more long lasting effect on changing unhealthy eating behaviour. As we can see this initiative is beyond the level of awareness and provided great tools to put the plan in action.
http://www.missionnutrition.ca/

Nutrition Month History

March has been designated as Nutrition Month by dietitians of Canada since early 1980. In Ontario, Small group of nutritionists start the initiative in 1970 and chosen one week of the year as Nutrition week. They collaborated with other health professional and community groups. The campaign started to grow, and then local dietitians participated in the campaign by planning special activities in diverse places as shopping malls, work places, library and media. This broad approach contributed more success for the campaign. Therefore, the movement grows into other provinces and they started similar independent campaigns. After almost a decade, the campaign became so successful that all province associations and Canadian dietitian association joint together and announced the First National Nutrition Week. One year later, the campaign extended to one month because of the great accomplishments of the campaign.

Concurrency of Persian New Year with Nutrition Month

The first time I heard that March is Nutrition Month, it made me think, is it really a coincident that NowRuz (Persian New Year) and Nutrition Months both start in March and end by the end of the month!
The Persian New Year begins at the exact moment of the vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the equator and winter ends. The festivities continue for 13 days, start usually from March 21 and ends by the first day of April. It celebrates Fertility and renewal as it believed that the Nowruz is the earth’s birthday; therefore it is the best day to start fresh and initiate any change in your life. Nowruz is full of symbols of spring and fertility. Those who celebrate NowRuz arrange seven items called haft-sinn, which placed on the special cloth, Not Surprisingly they are mostly food! Apples represent beauty; garlic is Health ; wild olives is love, a dish of specially raised wheat or lentil sprouts represents Rebirth, a creamy pudding made from wheat germ regarded as Holy, sumac berries represent the color of sun and Victory, Vinegar stand for old age and Patience, basket of eggs symbolize Fertility, A jar of water is sometimes added to symbolize Purity and Freshness, along with bread, a traditional symbol of a Sustainer of Life. And non food items are gold fish represents Life, mirror symbolize reflection and Creation and candles represents enlightenment and Happiness.
on the other hand Nutrition Month has been designated to cherish healthy life style and start to make healthy eating changes
Now, I believe you are able to make more connection between Nutrition month and NowRuz in which both representing healthy lifestyle and a fresh start!

The role of Partnership in community practice

Usually when we are considering some of the challenges associated with community nutrition practice we all looking for funding, support and money needed to allocate interventions and promotion plans.
Partnership consists of multiple terms such as different organization, stakeholders and sponsors. What is important is the rationale behind the partnership.

Here, I’m going to bring an odd and interesting example of partnership. American society of Nutrition education tended to develop education initiative; however they had some funding challenges. Therefore they actually went to McDonald’s foundation and they asked for they support in developing this initiative.
In this partnership all the information and skill sets provided by American Society of Nutrition Education and all funding and budgeting supported by McDonald’s foundation organization.
Series of Public Service announcements in the form of cartoons have been created. these PSAs are mostly targeting young kids by taking engaging and fun approach. McDonald's in partnership with educators and nutrition and health experts, teach students to make balanced nutrition choices and develop an interest in being active and staying healthy.
McDonalds partnership provided great opportunity in terms of funding and through the cartoon PSAs it also offered an accurate, high-quality nutrition education message for kids.
Through this example we learn that no matter with whom we join and collaborate, the nutrition massage should be always clear and grounded in research. As Nutrition professionals, it is our responsibility to make sure that the nutrition education message is accurate and has not been changed to suit the source of funding.

Bringing new Aspect in to Parks

The story of Dufferin Grove Park:
In order to bring joy to the park, Jutta Mason, suggested the idea of bringing food into parks. At that time no food was allowed in parks in Toronto, because of the food safety issue. However, when the members of Dufferin Grove Park take the initiative to make the bake oven, they found out there is nothing against the idea! The oven was so small to be included into building jurisdiction and since it was the enclosed fire there was no problem with fire department as long as they set some distance away from any other building.
We usually tend to believe if something is not there it has to be against the low. However we can use some roles against roles and spin it around!
They made the oven in 1995 and soon after it had become very popular. The smell of the fresh baked bread gathered many people into the park. People start to share their experience and memories from their childhood and back home bake ovens. The bake oven in Dufferin Grove Park made the whole place sweater with young kids eating sliced breads with butter.
Community parks play a vital role in promoting healthy eating and active living especially to young children and adolescent to pursue healthier lifestyles.
Since community parks are usually accessible they can be great places to offer range of activities for children. However, it is necessary to identify park characteristics which lead to more physical activity. Therefore, Community health professionals and community parks can work in partnership to design activities in order to decrease the rate of childhood obesity in Canada.

The Role of “awareness” and steps toward change

According to Malcolm Gladwell , philosophy professor, in order to be successful in planning social changes we need to build awareness around the facts . He also mentions that people do not need all the detail information around the facts to make social changes. We make changes usually by simple massages.
It makes us think about change in different ways, as desirable change vs. undesirable, changes that people believe in, how people judge changes and also considering the kind of changes that are choice worthy.
He critically takes into question the awareness model for social changes. We usually tend to create change by informing the public about the seriousness about the cause. It means that awareness has been used as the first step in information model. Conversely, Malcolm Gladwell has been skeptical to this model in terms of usefulness of this approach in generating action since usually there is a huge gap between knowing and doing. He mentions that awareness should not necessarily come into first stage because education by itself sometimes doesn’t make enormous amount of change.
So how do we measure change?
As we have seen there are so many programs just to create awareness about healthy eating and active living, but how effective these programs have been so far?
Do we start from knowing or change start to happen after we start taking the actions toward change?
We need to focus more on effective strategies to move population toward healthier nutrition practices and active living while maintaining awareness.In recent global financial crisis, I believe in order to make successful changes more budgets has to be allocated for effective nutrition strategies such as $100 healthy food supplement. Since, it is not wise to just educate people about healthy eating while they can’t afford it

Unequal opportunities, Unequal growth

When we think about stunted children we always think that it happens in underdeveloped and third world countries. We tend to assume that stunting due to malnutrition is unlikely to happen in developed countries such as Canada. However, recent research revealed the exact opposite.
According to Universite de Montreal a study has found that children in low-income families, who are living under constant poverty and can not afford basic needs, are at higher risk of being stunted. In this research both the family’s economic situation and the height of the children have been reported by mothers. Researchers discovered that there is significant relation between height and poverty regardless of the neonatal condition and mother’s height.
The families of these children mostly reported not having enough money to pay for basic needs such as housing, heating, clothing, medication and transportation. Therefore these children not only suffer from hunger and malnutrition but also they would be shorter than their youngsters. There are many underlying factors associated with poverty which leads to child delayed growth.
According to Prof Maria-Victoria Zunzunegui, who also worked on the study, poverty related illnesses such as asthma is directly related to shorter stature. Also, being exposed to chronic stress also negatively impacts body metabolism which possibly leads to delayed growth. Séguin stated that shorter stature have a potential for psychological consequences such as being discriminated against and having less social mobility
Based on the Campaign 2000, anti poverty coalition, one in nine children is living under poverty. Unfortunately, stat shows that the numbers of children using food banks are rising every year and they are representing a large group of food bank users.
As we can see Government Canada require allocating more budget as well as public policies and action plans to eradicate child poverty.
Protecting the child health is fall under family principles which is one of the main principles of Ontario public health standards.
Reducing poverty is recognized as one of the top priorities in Ontario. One of the major steps taken toward this goal is the introduction of $100 healthy food supplement for all adults on social assistance. Also they’ve allocated the budget for student nutrition program in order to decrease the gap between healthy living and poverty.
Despite all the plans and intervention we are far from the goal which is to eradicate the child poverty in Canada and guaranteed access to nutritious food for all Canadians.


http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/01/20/poor-short.html?ref=rss
http://www.thestar.com/article/574471
http://www.campaign2000.ca/

Childhood experiences contribute for future

Couple of weeks ago I watched the Tommy Douglas biography. He is known as the father of Medicare and a founder of universal public health care system in Canada. What I found interesting in his biography was that his desire to establish universal health care system stems in his childhood experience. Growing up in a non-wealthy family and being diagnosed with osteoarthritis, nearly cost Tommy his leg. Since then as a politician he worked and envisioned universal system of health care that moved beyond provincial to national enactment, and today has become the ideal model in the most countries in the world.
If we just rethink about his story we can see that a wonderful idea which is now serving as a model in the world and saving a life of countless people using universal health care lay down in a single tragic childhood experience.

what children experince in their childhood can be the start of what they want to fallow in future. for instance, My interest to pursue a career in the field of dietetics and health care stems from my own childhood experiences. I have grown up in Iran and when I was a child, Iran was involved in a war with Iraq for eight years. During the war I experienced firsthand food scarcity, when most food factories had been closed. I have never forgotten the smell of fresh butter the first time that my mother could bring it to our table after months of doing without
Today we are facing an economy turndown. Many children are witnessing their parents loosing their jobs and can’t afford their mortgages. The number of children growing poor and hungry is rising. Governments all around the world are all looking for a solution to end the economic crisis. However any government can guarantee that the solutions would work. I believe there are many children like Tommy Douglas with brilliant ideas. We should be careful that every child has the equal opportunity to fully reach their potential since our future will be in their hands.