Nutrition Practices to Grow Healthy Communities

Chapter Overview and Statement of Objectives

Diet and nutrition are central to the wellbeing of communities, influencing the energy community members have to participate in the life of the community and the health outcomes of its members. Yet, community-level approaches to promoting nutritional health are inconsistent and vary across the world. This chapter proposes sustainable approaches to promote the nutritional health of communities based on the Social-Ecological Models and Policy Diffusion Models. We aim to describe nutrition and diet-related disparities in both the US and globally, discuss approaches that have been used to address these disparities, and finally, to outline potential strategies for building communities with sustainable food and nutrition plans that minimize disparities. We consider nutrition and diet-related disparities, hunger, and food insecurity in the US and across the world. We describe approaches that have been tried so far, including traditional interventions such as food distribution programs and education programs, as well as more recent approaches such as microloans and urban forests. We also discuss how cultural and political influences may influence diet-related disparity, such as how culturally preferred foods may affect efforts to improve diet quality and how political views of poverty may influence the types of policies considered acceptable to improve food access. Finally, we discuss areas that require continued research to improve communities’ nutritional health, such as improved mapping of nutrition problems and their barriers, how to implement more sustainable diets and food systems while respecting cultural foodways, and how to influence attitudes toward chronic poverty to expand the types of interventions available to policymakers.