Summary:
The Guidelines for Healthy Diets and Physical Activity aim to promote healthy eating and active living as preventive measures. It address diet and physical inactivity related to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).
Description:
General Overview of the National Guidelines for Healthy Diets and Physical Activity
The National Guidelines for Healthy Diets and Physical Activity identify the resources and national/county focal points that would be necessary to facilitate implementation. Additionally, it outlines collaborative opportunities across key sectors such as agriculture, education, urban planning, gender and sports, transport, as well as, communication, and monitoring and evaluation.
They are intended for use across sectors by professionals. Those include health managers, health care workers, implementing partners, training institutions, agriculture extension workers among others in all their efforts to promote optimal nutrition and health.
Among different topics, the Guidelines address the following issues on food environments:
- Principles of healthy eating (Chapter 2);
- Nutrition in the life cycle, Nutrition status assessment (Chapter 3).
- Food production, preparation and processing (Chapter 5).
Key Provisions
Regarding FULL purposes, the policy document defines “food processing” for increasing food variety, as the products can be stored for a longer time and distributed to areas where the processed foods are unavailable (Chapter 5).
The document also points out recommendations on (Chapter 2.1):
- eating a “variety of foods from different food groups every day. This includes whole or unprocessed
starchy foods as part of meals”. - the type of this variety of foods, such as vegetables, grains;
- the recommended weekly intake amount.