Community Nutrition Essay

Woneata Stallworth

Community Nutrition

Final Paper

3/31/14

Introduction:

Brazil is transitioning from a country that mainly has an underweight population to more of the population becoming obese. This problem is commonly known as the double burden of malnutrition. Historically in Brazil your level of income has determined your obesity. That is no longer the case as more and more low-income people become obese. In a survey conducted in 1975 there were 2 cases of underweight to 1 case of overweight versus in 1997 there was greater than 2 obese women to 1 underweight woman. With this double burden of malnutrition comes a host of other problems.

Among teenagers the obesity rate is also increasing. Teenagers tend to snack on calorie dense snacks, without regard to nutritional content. In a survey conducted in Brazil among 63 adolescents, a large portion listed pastries as their favorite snack and everyone listed a soft drink as their favorite beverage. ii In that same survey 78% indicated that their mother was very important or important in exerting a degree of influence over their eating habits, while family members (65%) and fathers (64%) also had influence over their snacking habits. ii It was also shown that the majority of nutritional information (91%) that adolescents receive comes from their family. ii

The study above highlights the importance of parental involvement when conducting interventions targeted at adolescents. In order to affect adolescents we also need to affect the parents. An intervention without parent or community involvement is much less likely to succeed, than an intervention that incorporates multiple family members (in particular the mother) and the community. This study was conducted among adolescent...

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...Because of this a lot of interventions stress the importance of home cooking. A study was conducted to determine if there was an impact from cooking and home food preparations interventions. Through this study it was determined that interventions with home food preparation and cooking may have positive impacts. There were some weaknesses in the study design, assessment and study population and these weaknesses make this study a little unreliable but I think it provides some evidence of the benefits of this type of intervention.

Based off of other interventions I think that the CP was on the right track. They incorporated the community, focused on a community that really needed the attention, and partnered with other organizations to provide more access. The CP main problem is that it doesn’t address poverty and the sustainability of the program is not clear.