This week we were to choose a public health topic. I
chose nutrition/malnutrition for my topic. I have seen the effects that
nutrition can have on children. I worked as the Health Advocate Coordinator for
a family center for several years. During this time, I collaborated with
Cooking Matters and Share Our Strengths to provide opportunities for children
to learn about healthy eating in a way that was affordable. This topic is
meaningful to me, because my nieces have lived in a situation with their
parents where they never received proper nutrition and they did not know when
their next meal would be. When I was younger, I had another set of family
members that lived in that type of situation. My oldest daughter struggles to
gain weight and is considered underweight. While she is provided proper nutrition,
she is still struggling to gain or maintain her weight. These facts have made
the topic of nutrition/malnutrition meaningful to me.
As I researched the nutrition and malnutrition in
different parts of the world, I concluded that the basic dietary/nutritional
guidelines are very similar. Most of the countries have something similar to
our food pyramid or my plate. I researched the nutrition in Denmark and
discovered that the nutrition guidelines are very similar to ours. I learned that,
as with our country water is a very important aspect of proper nutrition. One
of the things that I really liked hearing was that even in other countries the
main cause of malnutrition is due to poor food and nutrition intake. This problem
exists everywhere. One of the ways that everything that I have learned is going
to influence my future work is to make me surer that I am going to encourage
and demonstrate proper nutrition and food intake with everyone I work with.
Hi Krystal,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your story, I enjoyed reading your blog this week. It amazing to learn about different places that study the same food pyramid or plate portions. I just wish there were more information or studies that would assist each person individually. Unlike your nieces, my problem is keeping the weight off. I am every active physically however the weight remains on body. I understand about portion control and the number of servings for each food group, I just wish my knowledge and physical activity would work together so I could be happy. Do you have any other suggestions that would help my situation?
Thank you for responding to my blog. There are many factors that most people do not consider when trying to loose weight. I can relate to your struggles I too am large and have been trying to loose weight since I had my first child, seven years ago. I have always been on the larger side and you should have seen the looks I would get when I would tell people that I was a health advocate. One of the things that I have recently learned more about is that in some cases not in-taking enough protein and/or fiber can make it difficult to loose weight. This is just an opinion and may not help any one else, but it is what I have found out recently.
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