Nutrition Education - Brief Description

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Nutrition Education is an essential component to improve the nutritional status of a population and is crucial for the well-being of people in general. The ongoing methodological debate keeps addressing the failure of conventional nutrition education and is searching for key issues and lessons learnt in successful educational approaches. Within the integrated Food Security Programmes of GTZ, nutritional education is an integrated part of the concept and has been developed in many projects.

In the past, nutrition education consisted mainly of face-to-face conversations between the health or community worker and individual persons. People were informed about “what to do” instead of encouraged about nutrition and health.

But in recent years, more effective nutrition education approaches, with well-defined strategies in communication and behavioural psychology, have been used by inter-disciplinary teams. A global approach to nutrition education, based on causes of malnutrition, culturally determined norms and social communication of a community, will be presented in this chapter to bring about longterm behavioural changes in the population.

Figure 1: What do you think about the “Three Food Groups”?

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Source: King, F.S.; Burgess, A.: Nutrition in Developing Countries. Oxford Univ. Press, 1996