Healthy Food Made Easy
17 Feb 2012
The Healthy Food Made Easy Programme
The Southside Partnership DLR is an independent local development organisation serving Dun Laoghaire Rathdown. Established in 1996, their brief is to tackle socio-economic disadvantage and social exclusion within all sectors of our community. The Healthy Food Made Easy Initiative has been set up to tackle some of these issues. It is a Health Service Executive (HSE) Health Promotion Service funded initiative run jointly by Southside Partnership DLR and the HSE Health Promotion Service; Dublin Mid- Leinster where is has been delivered since September 2007. The purpose of the programme is to provide opportunities for parents to enhance their own educational experience, and to help to generate a positive approach to education in the home and in communities.
The aims of the programme are:
To encourage healthy eating (including oral health messages)
To improve the nutritional knowledge and eating behaviour for participants and their families
To empower participants to make healthy, nutritious and economical food choices for themselves and their families
To reduce diet-related illness from preventable disease.
The Dental Health Foundation supports this initiative and in fact one of its Recommendations in its White Paper - The Importance of Oral Health Promotion is to promote healthier lifestyles with the aim of reducing chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, obesity and diabetes including promotion of:
□ Decreased intake of sugars and well-balanced nutrition
□ Tobacco cessation and decreased alcohol consumption
□ Increased fruit and vegetable consumption
Reducing health inequalities is a matter of fairness and social justice. Creating a fairer society is fundamental to improving the health of the whole population and ensuring a fairer distribution of good health (The Marmot Review 2010).
