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Nutrition education, as defined by Dr. Isobel Contento a leader in the field, is “any combination of educational strategies, accompanied by environmental supports, designed to facilitate voluntary adoption of food choices and other food and nutrition-related behaviors conducive to health and well-being. It is delivered through multiple venues and involves activities at the individual, community, and appropriate policy levels.”1 Nutrition education is an evidence-based, cost-effective way to improve health outcomes and foster healthy eating habits throughout life.

In our rapidly changing world, nutrition education continues to be of paramount importance. We all need to know how to eat well to optimize our health and prevent disease. Behavioral strategies are needed to motivate and give individuals and families the capacity and food skills to adopt healthy lifestyle behaviors. Further, individual behavior to make healthy choices requires a supportive physical environment with accessible and affordable healthy food choices. Meaningful solutions to improve diet must take into account effective behavioral strategies and also the need for environmental and policy support. This workshop addressed nutrition education and strategies for improving nutrition and healthy eating in 3 different contexts: nutrition education in the first 1,000 days; nutrition education in child care, schools, and community settings; and nutrition education for healthcare professionals.

The first 1,000 days (from conception to age 24 months) is a foundational period that lays the groundwork for health, growth, and development throughout life. This workshop uses a developmental perspective to examine nutrition education, beginning with maternal nutrition prior to conception and extending to the prenatal period, and then encompassing the first 2 years of the postnatal period. Nutrition education has to address the rapidly changing nutritional requirements for infants and toddlers, including breast feeding and complementary feeding. In addition to nutritional requirements, children’s eating and regulatory skills are also emerging, along with their ability to signal hunger and satiety. Thus, nutrition education includes not only nutritional requirements, but also feeding behavior, mealtime patterns, and caregivers’ responses to children’s signals. The workshop highlights nutrition education as a central component of the Nurturing Care Framework and the importance of ensuring supportive enabling environments, extending from the home to communities and policies.

Improving dietary patterns and overall health will require a sustained multi-sector commitment beginning prior to pregnancy and continuing throughout the life course, and which addresses not only individual behaviors, but also the environmental context and conditions in which people live and make choices. Individual behavior change is difficult to achieve without addressing the context in which people make decisions. Significant steps are needed to make healthful food choices available, identifiable, and affordable to people no matter where they live. Our goals should be to structure neighborhoods, homes, and institutional environments so that healthy behaviors are the optimal defaults. In this workshop, we include nutrition education strategies in place-based settings where individuals and families spend much of their time – childcare centers, schools, and communities.

Parallels in challenges and strategies are applicable to nutrition education of health professionals, along with nutrition’s role in prevention and healing processes. Nutrition education is one of the many topics that need to be taught to healthcare professionals. This workshop presents creative strategies to incorporate nutrition education into medical school curricula, including online education, flipped classrooms, integrated longitudinal curricula, culinary skills training, and nutritional assessment on boards exams. Strategies to incorporate nutrition education into continuing education can enable practicing physicians and professionals in healthcare to integrate nutrition education into their recommendations, thereby supporting the health-promoting aspects of nutrition to patients and families.

Maureen M. Black

Helen K. Delichatsios

Mary T. Story

Contento IR. Nutrition Education: Linking Research, Theory, and Practice, Third Edition, Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC, 2016.

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