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Healthy Eating: Awareness and Education

Categories:

  • Healthy eating,
  • Social environment,
  • Community,
  • Facilities & organizations,
  • Healthcare facilities,
  • Schools,
  • Workplace,

Awareness and Education

Research shows awareness and education campaigns encourage healthy eating in the community.1-6

A community team focused on promoting healthy eating and engaged the community to in learning how to prepare salad in a jar. This creative project involved using mason jars to make, store and transport a salad. 

Ways to get started

  • Highlight a key message(s) to create your campaign (e.g. the importance of fruits and vegetables)7, 8 and ensure it aligns with Canada’s Food Guide.
  • Tailor your messages to your audience.1-7, 9, 10
  • Gather partners who can help spread your message or contribute in-kind materials.
  • Create campaigns that align with existing events that have a large media or marketing reach.
  • Create an online campaign.
  • Consider embedding strategies that increase knowledge and awareness with group activities that aim to build skills in budgeting and food preparation.
  • Work with your municipality to include healthy eating in community plans. Learn more about how the local food system can support a healthy community.

 

For further action to promote/increase healthy eating in your community, see:

Multi-component community-wide interventions that promote/increase healthy eating in your community will have greater impact than implementing single one-off strategies. Multi-component interventions may include policies that increase the availability, affordability and access to healthy eating options in your community.

Evaluation measures the impact of all the hard work that went into developing a community initiative. Evaluating impact examines: 

  1. What you expect to learn or change
  2. What you measure and report
  3. How to measure impact

What you expect to learn about awareness and education may include:

  • Learning that the strategy was implemented as planned
  • Learning that the strategy is reaching those you want to reach
  • Increased knowledge on topic
  • Intent to share knowledge

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External Resources

Healthy Eating Starts Here

A collection of educational resources to promote healthier eating.

View Resource

The Twelve Steps to Developing a Health Communication Campaign

12 steps for creating a health communication campaign.

View Resource

Canada’s Food Guide

Canada's updated Food Guide

View Resource

Evidence Brief: Perceptions and Reactions to Obesity- or Weight-Related Health Messaging Campaigns

Impacts of weight-related health messaging campaigns

View Resource

Awareness and Education

  1. Jeffery RW, French SA, Raether C, Baxter JE. An environmental intervention to increase fruit and salad purchases in a cafeteria. Preventative medicine. 1994;23(6):788-792.
  2. Jordan KC, Erickson ED, Cox R, et al. Evaluation of the Gold Medal Schools program. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2008;108(11):1916-1920.
  3. Blanck HM, Kim SA. Creating Supportive Nutrition Environments for Population Health Impact and Health Equity: An Overview of the Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network's Efforts. 2012;43:S85-S90.
  4. Shankar P, Arroyo C, Crespo D, Bennett T. An Overwhelming Need for Community-Based Nutrition Education in a Rural Population. J Am Diet Assoc 2008 9;108(9, Supplement):A100.
  5. Roy, R, kelly,B, Rangan, A, Allman-Farinelli, M. Food Environment Intervientions to Improve the Dietary Behavior of Young Adults in Tertiary Education Settings: A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2015;115(10):1681.e1.doi:10.1016/J.jand.2015.06.380.
  6. Ottem A. Healthy eating and food security: promising strategies for BC. Toronto (ON): Dietitians of Canada; 2010. Available from: https://www.dietitians.ca/Downloads/Public/Healthy-Eating-and-Food-Security-Strategies-BC.aspx.
  7. National Guideline Clearing House. American Cancer Society guidelines on nutrition and physical activity for cancer prevention: reducing the risk of cancer with healthy food choices and physical activity. Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ); 2012. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22237782.
  8. Hollands GJ, Shemilt I, Marteau TM, Jebb SA, Lewis HB, Wei Y, Higgins J, Ogilvie D. Portion, package or tableware size for changing selection and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2015(9). doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD011045.pub2. Available from: http://www.cochrane.org/CD011045/PUBHLTH_portion-package-or-tableware-size-changing-selection-and-consumption-food-alcohol-andtobacco.
  1. Garcia J, Beyers J, Uetrecht C, et al. Healthy eating, physical activity, and healthy weights guideline for public health in Ontario. Toronto (ON): Cancer Care Ontario, Program in Evidence-based Care; 2010. Available from: http://ocp.cancercare.on.ca/common/pages/UserFile.aspx?fileId=64413.