Intervención para modificar hábitos alimentarios en los refrigerios de escolares de una ciudad fronteriza México / Estados Unidos

Resumen: El objetivo del presente estudio fue evaluar el efecto de una intervención en educación nutricional como estrategia para modificar la calidad de los refrigerios escolares de acuerdo con los estándares gubernamentales. Se evaluaron alumnos de 12 escuelas primarias públicas de nivel socioeconómico medio. Se formó un grupo intervención (GI) y un grupo control (GC), con seguimiento durante dos años. En ambos grupos se tomaron mediciones de peso, estatura y circunferencia de cintura. Se registró, durante cinco días consecutivos, los alimentos incluidos en la lonchera de los niños, previa firma de un consentimiento informado de los padres. Durante la intervención se realizaron pláticas sobre alimentación en el salón de clase para los escolares y a los padres de familia se les entregaron folletos sobre recomendaciones de un refrigerio adecuado. En el GC solo se entregaron folletos sin tener contacto con alumnos y padres de familia. Al final de la intervención, el GI disminuyó calorías ( p = 0.001), proteínas ( p = 0.01), carbohidratos ( p = 0.008) y azúcar ( p = 0.0001); mientras que en el GC disminuyó el contenido de carbohidratos y azúcar. Además, el GI aumentó el consumo de cereales integrales, verduras, frijoles y pan integral. En conclusión, la escuela es el lugar ideal para realizar intervenciones a largo plazo, sin embargo, es necesario promover la incorporación de profesionales de la salud (nutriólogos) con programas y actividades planeadas durante los seis años de primaria.

Waiora: the importance of Indigenous worldviews and spirituality to inspire and inform Planetary Health Promotion in the Anthropocene

We now live in a new geological age, the Anthropocene – the age of humans – the start of which coincides with the founding of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) 70 years ago. In this article, we address the fundamental challenge facing health promotion in its next 70 years, which takes us almost to 2100: how do we achieve planetary health? We begin with a brief overview of the massive and rapid global ecological changes we face, the social, economic and technological driving forces behind those changes, and their health implications. At the heart of these driving forces lie a set of core values that are incompatible with planetary health. Central to our argument is the need for a new set of values, which heed and privilege the wisdom of Indigenous worldviews, as well as a renewed sense of spirituality that can re-establish a reverence for nature. We propose an Indigenous-informed framing to inspire and inform what we call planetary health promotion so that, as the United Nations Secretary General wrote recently, we can make peace with nature.

Strengthening health promotion practice: capacity development for a transdisciplinary field

The growing burden of non-communicable and newly emerging communicable diseases, multi-morbidity, increasing health inequalities, the health effects of climate change and natural disasters and the revolution in communication technology require a shift of focus towards more preventive, people-centred and community-based health services. This has implications for the health workforce, which needs to develop new capacities and skills, many of which are at the core of health promotion. Health promotion is thus being mainstreamed into modern public health. For health promotion, this offers both opportunities and challenges. A stronger focus on the enablers of health enhances the strategic importance of health promotion’s whole-of-society approach to health, showcases the achievements of health promotion with regard to core professional competencies, and helps build public health capacity with health promotion accents. On the other hand, mainstreaming health promotion can weaken its organizational capacity and visibility, and bears the risk of it being absorbed into a traditional public health discourse dominated by medical professions. To address these challenges and grasp the opportunities, it is essential for the health promotion workforce to position itself within the diversifying primary care and public health field. Taking the transdisciplinary status of health promotion and existing capacity development systems in primary and secondary prevention and health promotion as reference points, this paper considers the possibilities to integrate and implement health promotion capacities within and across disciplinary boundaries, arguing that the contribution of health promotion to public health development lies in the complementary nature of specialist and mainstreamed health promotion.

A short-form suggestion for the Turkish version of the European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire: a development and validation study in university students

The European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire was translated into Turkish following a validity and reliability study, but there is no comprehensive short form available. We aimed to suggest a short form of the 47-item Turkish version of European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire in this study. Data were obtained from a cross-sectional study that included a total of 686 students, 345 male and 341 female, conducted in nine different faculties of a university using the Turkish version of European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire. The development process of the short form was conducted using principal component analysis with exploratory factor analysis, and correlation and regression analyses. The validation process was done using confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis. Based on the results, a 12-item short form was developed, retaining the conceptual framework of the European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire. The short form was shown to have adequate psychometric properties with high reliability, good validity, a high and moderate level of correlation, and a good model fit with the independent dataset in this cross-sectional study. The short form developed in this study was demonstrated to be a valid and reliable tool to measure health literacy easily and rapidly in Turkey.