In the Learning Journal, imagine you work for a community health organization.

  What
dietary changes would you recommend to promote better nutritional health in your
community? What practices do you feel are important to emphasize and why?  What
anatomic and/or physiologic changes can you promote through dietary changes?

Diet plays a massive role in how our health will turn out to be, be that in the short term or
long term, choices we make today define how the future is likely to turn out to be. A healthy
diet eaten in moderation can reduce the risks of many diseases and cancers, is good for the
heart, improves mood, helps strengthen teeth and bones, improves gut health, and many
more benefits that come with a healthy nutritious diet (Crichton-Stuart, 2020).

As a community health organisation worker, I will introduce many dietary changes to help
my community improve their dietary intake and help them live healthier lives with better
nutrition. One of the first things I will introduce to my community is mindful eating because
we people in the first world are too distracted while consuming our food, we watch TV, talk
while eating or perform other tasks while eating. According to LeWine (2013), eating and
performing other tasks at the same time can lead to binge-eating, and consuming low
nutritional foods, which can eventually lead to weight gain. Mindful eating can help manage
weight and improve health by slowly understanding the foods we consume and what
benefits they have. It is important to start by starting with one meal at a time either daily or
weekly (LeWine, 2013).

Healthy eating is important, but it is also important to eat in moderation and have a variety
of foods, what this means is, that we do not want to end up eating in extreme amounts and
we want to have a variety of different foods in our diet. This way we are still able to eat foods
that may not have much nutritional value but at least we still get to eat them from time to
time so we don’t end up craving them and losing all the progress made. Eating a variety of
foods makes sure we end up receiving all sorts of necessary nutrients to help achieve a
healthy diet (Zimmerman & Snow, 2012).

A balanced diet is another factor I will introduce to my community because personally, I have
seen several people who are told this and that food is good and they end up eating that
food too much, this can be bad because this way we can end up consuming too much of one
nutrient in the expense of another. For example, if we end up eating too much of foods that
are high in calcium, it can lead to interference with iron absorption (Zimmerman & Snow,
2012). It is important to absorb a range of nutrients because this allows your cells to have
building blocks for metabolic processes, which allows the release of energy for the cells to be
able to carry out daily tasks, such as creating new cells, and producing proteins, and so on.
Physical activity and a balanced diet go hand in hand with each other because both of these
can help slow down the deterioration of the body as you age (OpenStax, 2018).
All the factors mentioned in the paragraphs above will bring many benefits to the people in
my community. A healthy diet along with physical activity can help prevent diseases such as
osteoporosis, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and help to remain healthy even in old age.

References:

Crichton-Stuart, C. (2020). What are the benefits of eating healthy? Medical News Today.
Retrieved from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322268

LeWine. (2013). Distracted Eating May add to Weight Gain. Harvard Health Publishing. Retrieved
from: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/distracted-eating-may-add-to-weight-gain-
201303296037

OpenStax. (2018). Anatomy & physiology. Houston, TX: Rice University. Retrieved from:
https://cnx.org/contents/FPtK1zmh@12.6:fEI3C8Ot@16/Preface

Zimmerman M., & Snow, B. (2012). An Introduction to Nutrition (v. 1.0). Available online at

http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/an-introduction-to-nutrition/index.html