Nutritional guide for a modern woman: A strategy for health education

Author: 
Maria do Rosário Dias, Alexandra Freches Duque, Inês Filipa Gaspar, Ana Cristina Neves

In the present article, we introduce a Health Education instrument that stems from a refection on the lay knowledge, salutogenic habits and daily nutritional practices of modern women in our current society. We developed a guide aimed at modern women, where the different food groups and food hygiene and safety measures are addressed. The guide includes eleven original pictograms that help the reader to locate and look up specific issues. The guide employs the label reading and interpretation principles, following the nutrition traffic-light internationally instituted, for it renders scientific information on nutrition clear and accessible to the general population. We believe that using this guide as a central strategy in health promotion will lead its users to adopt essential changes in their eating patterns and, in so doing, contribute to prevent diseases associated to bad eating habits. We also emphasize the role of mass media in spreading the conveyed information.

Paper No: 
906