Nutrition Communication—Experiments, Experiences and Exasperation

Abstract

Communication for promoting nutrition needs the practitioners to be out and about having constant contact with people. They indeed have a role to play in demystifying ‘nutrition science’ to communicate, interpret, and apply the information to the language and lifestyles of people to benefit their health. Although many factors contribute to people’s food choices and lifestyles, communication is one way to emphasize the importance of good nutrition, to promote knowledge about ‘appropriate’ food choices, change certain cultural norms or beliefs about diets and to promote healthy behaviours. This can involve a variety of communication tools to convey a set of learning experiences for facilitating the adoption of ‘healthy’ dietary and nutrition behaviours. Educational activities usually focus on informing the individuals, communication recognizes that the diet related behaviour of an individual is the product of that individual's continuous interaction with his or her environment. Most communication programmes even today aim at mere awareness creation. Such approaches can be effective in increasing knowledge, but may not change the dietary behaviour or practices. To motivate self-directed behaviour change, making people aware of the scientific rationale to alter the established food related practices is as important as providing the resources and enabling environment for behaviour change. This chapter attempts to discuss why nutrition educators have to think beyond mere information dissemination? Why do the aspects that affect nutrition behaviours matter? What is prompting the paradigm shift? What are the common steps in different approaches to nutrition communication? How the changing media scenario with ICTs, social media co-existing with traditional modes of communication and information seeking affect information dissemination? After all the research experiments, and practical experiences why communicators and people are often exasperated?