Lecture 21: Food Environments and Food Allergies Flashcards
(16 cards)
What are the top 3 factors influencing people’s food choices?
- Taste
- Price
- Healthiness
What are two kinds of strategies to promote better nutrition?
- Individual strategies: Rely on individuals to make or sustain behaviour change
- Environmental strategies: Work through changes in the wider environment
–> Growing evidence that dietary education targeted at individuals has limited sustained benefit and increases inequalities
What are 4 kinds of population approaches and are they considered to be effective?
- Food systems (eg. food labelling, nutrition content); yes
- Public policy, regulation and legislation (eg. sugar tax); yes
- Society and culture (eg. community-based interventions); yes
- Personal skill development and social marketing (eg. cooking skills, mass media campaigns); inconclusive
How does individual agency relate to interventions and equity?
- Greater the degree of individual agency required for an intervention to be effective, the more likely it is that the intervention will preferentially benefit people with a higher socioeconomic position
- Interventions focused on education and behavior change likely to have a negative impacted can be detrimental to equity
- Interventions that change the environment and involve broadscale community action likely to have a positive impact
What is the Food-EPI tool?
- 7 Policy and 6 infra-structure domains
- Compilation of nutrition and obesity prevention policies in NZ
- Public Health Experts Rating against international best practice
- Recommended actions for government
What are 7 best buys and other recommended interventions by the WHO?
- Reformulation of policies for healthier foods/beverages
- Front-of-package labelling
- Public food procurement for healthy diets
- Behaviour change communication and mass media campaigns
- Policies to protect children form the harmful effects of food marketing
- Protection, promotion and support of optimal breastfeeding practices
- Taxation on sugar-sweetened beverages
What are 2 opportunities and 3 challenges when it comes to food reformulation?
Opportunities:
- Small changes could have large impact on population diets (UK salt strategy)
- Will reach groups at greatest risk of diet-related disease
Challenges:
- Working with industry
- Technical challenges (Role in preservation, flavour, and processing)
- Voluntary changes unlikely to have large impact unless undertaken by industry as a whole (need coordinated action by Govt)
What is being done in NZ?
- Heart Foundation HEARTSAFE programme
- NZ signed up to WHO UN goal
–> 30% relative reduction in sodium intakes by 2025
–> Heart Foundation led meeting and position paper to Health Minister on achieving targets
–> No Government action.
Do front-of-package labels encourage reformulation?
Yes, 4/5 products that displayed Health Star Rating were reformulated and had less energy, sodium and more fibre
Explain front of pack labelling
- Convenient, relevant, easily understood nutrition information and/or guidance on food packs
- Assist consumers to make informed food purchases and healthier eating choices
- Range of FOP labels introduced in different countries
- Show nutritional quality through: colour-coding (e.g. traffic lights), symbolic (e.g. pick the tick), information in context of diet (e.g. Guideline Daily Amounts)
- Agreement that labels are needed, but disagreement on the most effective format
What are 3 types of front of pack labelling?
-
Interpretive:
- Information about one or more nutrients in a product as guidance rather than specific facts
- Nutrients are kept separate
- Thresholds are set for each nutrient -
Non-interpretive:
- Shows information only, with no specific context, no judgement or
recommendation -
Summary indicator system:
- Combines several criteria to establish one indication of the healthiness of a product, shows judgement or a recommendation
- Nutrient levels combined to give overall rating
- Thresholds for combined score, eg, number of stars
What are 3 unintended consequences of food labelling?
- Nutrition labelling may be used more by “worried well” and high-income, well-educated individuals, and thus maintain or increase health inequities
- Labelled and healthier foods may cost more, thus limiting access by some population groups
- Foods may be reformulated to achieve a better labelling profile but might not be actually healthier
What is the difference between a food allergy and a food intolerance
Food allergies are based on a reaction by the immune system, intolerances are not.
Intolerances are also not life threatening, however they can be hard to distinguish because symptoms can be quite similar.
What is the prevalence of food allergy in NZ?
Around 10% of infants have a food allergy by 12 months of age.
An estimate of 6-8% of schol children and 2-4% of adults have food allergies.
What are the 8 most common foods that account for 90% of all reactions?
- gluten
- eggs
- dairy
- soy
- peanuts
- tree nuts
- shellfish
- fish
What are 4 ways to help prevent food allergies?
- Breastfeeding exclusively until 6 months old
- Continue eating common food allergens during pregnancy and breastfeeding
- Removing these foods from diet may make it worse
- Delaying the introduction of allergenic foods is not recommended
