Nutrition education and consumer awareness
Effective nutrition education links with efforts to improve people’s food environments, such as social protection programmes, initiatives to improve the availability and affordability of nutritious foods, regulations to reduce the availability of foods with low nutrition value, and consumer movements that promote changes in food policy.
Nutrition education and consumer awareness work at FAO covers three main areas: food-based dietary guidelines, food labelling, and professional training in nutrition education. All together, the work contributes to the promotion of healthy diets from sustainable food systems focusing particularly on the consumer perspective. Check our latest publications and resources below.
Food-based dietary guidelines
FAO focuses on strengthening capacities of organizations and stakeholders, comprising of opportunities such as training workshops, technical consultations and regional meetings. These activities aim to encourage and assist Members to develop, implement, monitor and evaluate their own food-based dietary guidelines, across multiple sectors and levels, to inform policies and programmes for the promotion of healthy diets from sustainable food systems.
Professional training in nutrition education
FAO supports countries in strengthening capacities of institutions and individuals to design, implement, revise and evaluate effective nutrition education actions, policies and programmes. Effective nutrition education is not only about providing people with information on nutrition or how to improve their diets, but rather to empower and support them to develop skills and knowhow to improve their food practices and behaviours, including how to select and prepare nutritious foods, consume and feed others, store foods safely and how to avoid food waste.
To support professional development in nutrition education, FAO developed the ENACT (Education for Effective Nutrition in Action) and ENAF (Education Nutritionnelle en Afrique Francophone) courses. Both courses introduce participants to the principles and practice of effective nutrition education using a hands-on and practical approach. The courses can be used by academic institutions training nutrition and/or health students who will become professionals involved in nutrition education. They can be delivered online or face-to-face. To know more click below:
FAO has also developed a comprehensive methodology to understand learning gaps, needs and obstacles to integrating nutrition into agricultural programmes and policies.
The methodology aims at exploring opportunities and challenges to integrating nutrition, recognizing and addressing capacity needs of the agriculture extension and advisory services, and identifying gaps in training materials on nutrition-sensitive agriculture.
The Organization provides technical support to implement the capacity needs assessment and training activities at the country level. Check our latest publication below:
Food labelling
FAO supports countries in strengthening their capacities to use and implement food labelling as an effective policy tool to protect consumer health in terms of food safety and nutrition. FAO works in partnership with WHO to provide evidence based guidance to the Codex Alimentarius Commission and member countries related to the development of global norms and standards on food labelling. FAO further support countries, including government authorities and food chain actors, through the delivery of training tools to ensure implementation of appropriate food labelling systems at country level.
Food labelling (web page)