Improving America's Diet and Health From Recommendations to Action (1991) / Chapter Skim
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8 Education of the Public: Strategies and Actions for Implementation
8 Education of the Public: Strategies and Actions for Implementation
Pages 184-209
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From page 184... ...
Informal education refers to the almost infinite variety of educational experiences any society provides. Where food is concerned, these range from reading a newspaper article about dietary fat and fiber or watching food commercials on television to helping a parent cook dinner.
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From page 185... ...
The particular safety and health concerns that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s were translated by some people into a desire to buy what they believed to be health-promoting foods, often at health food stores. The food industry responded to this interest by bringing into the market a succession of foods that were intended to be perceived as healthy foods with designations such as 100% natural or organic.
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From page 186... ...
General Accounting Office (GAO) report entitled Food Marketing: Frozen Pizza Cheese Representative of Broader Food Labeling Issues (GAO, 1988~.
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From page 187... ...
The example nevertheless dramatizes the consumer's dilemma. A consumer who believes that a particular cheese product is nutritionally superior and therefore wishes to select it may see side by side in the frozen food case two boxes: a cheese pizza prominently marked "Contains Cheese Analog," which might be composed of 90% real cheese, and next to it a meat-containing pizza or a vegetarian pizza that contained no such label- which could contain from 90 to 100% cheese analog.
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From page 188... ...
The successful use of media as part of larger social marketing campaigns to encourage improved eating patterns is discussed in Chapter 3. One official attempt to convert television food advertisements into carriers of nutritionally educational information was made in 1974 by the FTC in a proposed Trade Regulation Rule that would have required nutrition information in certain kinds of food ads (Tobin, 1974~.
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From page 189... ...
As illustrated by the cheese analog, extra lean beef, and other labeling confusions, however, such rules of thumb are difficult to discover because decisions made by the private and public sectors have increased the complexity of the food supply and the food acquisition environment. In an environment glutted with small bits of data that do not readily coalesce into useful information, the only sorts of messages likely to be heard and remembered are simple, immediately useful ones.
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From page 190... ...
The necessity for free consumer choice is often emphasized by those who conceptualize education as a process of simply giving information. They argue that educators should not try to change behavior but, rather, should simply provide information that can be used by consumers in making their own food choices.
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From page 191... ...
In educating about food, for example, it is not possible to give consumers information about approximately 50 nutrients (as well as the many nonnutritive substances that may affect their health) in each of the thousands of items in the food supply and to provide this information in a context that will enable individuals to relate their food choices to their health.
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From page 192... ...
Health-related information about relative or absolute quantities of specific food components should always be placed within an overall context that emphasizes food and food choices. It will continue to be difficult for the public to eat wisely when no simple and immediately self-evident rules of food composition are applicable.
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From page 193... ...
This committee would be convened to develop guidelines and materials on the connections between diet and health, on the food selection and preparation skills necessary to implement dietary recommendations, and on placing recommended dietary changes in the context of overall reduction of health risks. The products of this committee could be distributed to all major publishers in the fields of health and fitness, as well as publishers of the major texts in areas such as science, consumer education, home economics, social studies, psychology, and others that touch on nutrition or dietary patterns.
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From page 194... ...
Overall, however, these activities tend to emphasize imparting knowledge of foods and nutrition rather than transmitting food coping skills, and they tend to focus as has much of the dietary guidance to date on basic commodities such as milk, meat, and produce. Thus, they do not adequately prepare children to deal with the extensively processed and packaged food supply of today.
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From page 195... ...
The curriculum would be expected to provide a framework and examples of specific materials and methods that could be locally adapted and amplified. The extensive resources and holdings of the Food and Nutrition Information Center at USDA's National Agricultural Library will likely be of considerable help in developing the proposed curriculum.
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From page 196... ...
ACTION 4: Revive, at the level of at least $0.50 per student, the USDA-administered Nutrition Education and Training (NE TJ Program that stimulated so much activity related to nutrition education in the late 1970s. The NET Program was created in 1978 to encourage good eating habits among schoolchildren and to teach them about relationships between diet and health (Kalina et al., 1989; USDA, 1986; see also Chapter 5~.
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From page 197... ...
. Congress, encouraged by lobbying by parents and professional associations, could revive the NET Program and provide it with adequate funding, even perhaps to the level of $1.00 per student per year, the funding level recently recommended by the American Dietetic Association (Hinton et al., 1990~.
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From page 198... ...
· Assess the food programs of a sample of child-care programs from around the United States. · Examine present standards for food and nutrition education training for health-care professionals, educators, and other people who provide care to preschool children, and determine minimally acceptable standards for such training.
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From page 199... ...
Members of the American Dietetic Association, the Society for Nutrition Education, the American Public Health Association, the American Institute of Nutrition, and the American Home Economics Association
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From page 200... ...
The Society for Nutrition Education, the American Dietetic Association's National Center for Nutrition and Dietetics, the Consumer Federation of America, the Cooperative Extension Service, the Consumers Union, and perhaps other professional consumer organizations should be involved in preparing, publicizing, and distributing the manual. Such a manual would lay out general principles and strategies for: · identifying reliable sources of information about food (e.g., the data bank discussed in Strategy 4, Action 2 below)
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From page 201... ...
ACTION 2: Prepare an inexpensive, continually updatablefoods data bank to inform consumers, food planners, and others about the nutritional content, composition, and production/processing history of the products available to them. Nutrition education professionals, food manufacturers, trade associations, food retailers, food technologists, consumer advocates, and appropriate government agencies should take the lead in establishing such a data bank as well as determining its content and format, relying heavily on the results of consumer surveys.
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From page 202... ...
Local affiliates of national professional organizations concerned with food, nutrition, and health should provide assistance to local schools, churches, work sites, hospitals, health departments, and community groups enabling them to (1) support on a local level the mass media and other national efforts to promote behavior consonant with dietary recommendations (see Strategy 6)
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From page 203... ...
To properly evaluate the worth of community nutrition education programs, multiple methods will be needed. Low-cost telephone interviews could be conducted to evaluate consumer knowledge and determine self-reported behavior change.
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From page 204... ...
The results of this initiative should be monitored. ACTION 2: Appoint a committee of experts in nutrition education, child development, social influence, and media to review past attempts to regulate television food advertising to children.
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From page 205... ...
These spokespeople should include people trained to clarify for food page editors how the new findings can be translated into food and cooking advice. The American Dietetic Association's Ambassadors Program and the Office of Scientific Public Affairs of the Institute of Food Technologists may serve such a role in certain contexts.
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From page 206... ...
Over radio and television, these tips could be provided by popular role models whose eating patterns meet dietary recommendations. Workshops should be conducted to train community leaders in techniques for working with their local radio and television stations and the local press to generate story ideas, assist with research, and provide resource people and materials.
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From page 207... ...
public comes explicitly or implicitly through the media, the need to engage this sector in promoting healthful eating behaviors is evident. Two major barriers to implementing this action are the large cost of an initiative of the size described and the resistance of large and powerful segments of the food industry to negative statements about its food or beverage products.
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From page 208... ...
1988. Food Marketing: Frozen Pizza Cheese Representative of Broader Food Labeling Issues.
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From page 209... ...
1974. Food advertising: proposed trade regulation rule.
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