Health Promotion Project
As a part of my Community Nutrition Class, we were required to complete a Health Promotion Project in our local community. Along with two fellow students, I gained permission from Giant Food Stores to set up an educational booth that had resources for shoppers to learn how reading food labels while shopping for their groceries can lead to healthier eating habits for them and their families. Below is a summary of our research findings and a list of goals we met through the implementation of our project.
The data collected in our research suggests that there are specific needs of our target population. We found that the state of Pennsylvania is ranked 25th for obesity rates with over 1 million cases since 2010. We know that obesity is directly correlated with the eating habits of individuals and that in most cases, individuals who do not have nutritional education do not know how to prevent chronic diseases and illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, etc. with proper diet. Regarding the socioeconomic status of our target population, nearly 40,000 individuals receive SNAP benefits to supplement any other income in order to support their individual and family nutritional needs. While the SNAP-Ed program promotes nutrition education, many individuals receiving SNAP benefits are unaware of how their food choices can affect their health. Our data shows that about 85% of individuals receiving government assistance do not eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. We also found that these individuals are not likely to read nutrition labels. Based on our survey at Giant, we found that nearly 40% of shoppers do not read nutrition labels. Without knowledge of how to read food labels, and which ingredients should be given specific attention, shoppers will not have the basic skills to prevent obesity and diet-related chronic illnesses. The following is a list of items we covered during the implementation of our health promotion project.
Building a healthy and balanced meal using the MyPlate model
How to read a food label
The nutritional effects of excess sodium, sugar and fat and how it relates to chronic disease and illness
Promote a healthy lifestyle through mindful grocery shopping
Below are some images from our event at Giant Food Store.
We put a spin on the sugar content bottle models, and recreated them with sodium models for canned and processed goods. The yellow cubes represent the grams of fat in each item.
The two images above are the infographics I created to hand out to the customers. The first one provides information on food additives and the second one provides information on shopping the perimeter of the store, both topics we focused on during the implementation of our project.
