Many researches show that youth/adults have good nutrition knowledge (health/nutrition literacy level), but the problem is they do not put these knowledge into practice. Many nutritional interventions failed, cause people can not sustain new healthy habits. What is the barriers?

Exactly, people have knowledge (of course still need to work on healthy/nutritional messages at certain population and age) but they just do not think about health as a long-term, do not think when they do food choices. It can be associated with desire outcomes as well which can motivate them. If they do not imagine or have desire outcomes of that messages they will not change their eating habits.

Thank you for sharing your experience!

WE should have a well structured communication plan for changing eating behaviour. The fact that over eating and weight gain contributes to Hypertension and Diabetes makes a lot of difference. Target setting for healthy weight for each individual has given me good result.

The research by Cullen suggests goal setting as a strategy for dietary behavior change. It is an amazing article, which should be considered, however need to be checked on larger populations and need further studies as well. Behavioral theory-based and knowledge-based programs do not seem be successful (or have short-term impact).

Hi,

if you want to change behavior, you could read articles from Olander et al. (2013) and all those from Michie et al. These authors worked on techniques that can be used to change behavior and that have the advantage to be easily usable in real life.

You'll see that some behavioral theories (or techniques related to theories) can have better impact than what is thought.

You'll also learn than knowledge are not related to change, and even inversely.

Thank you very much Ahmed, I will definately read those. Sadly. yes, knowledge is not much related to behaviour change or very slightly, it can change behaviour in short-term but can not sustain in long-term. Thanks again!

You're welcome Rimante

In agreement with you, knowledge is not related to behaviour change and sometimes, knowledges seem to inhibit the action. We may suppose that people with knowledge (that are not correct) have low levels of outcome expectancies so they may consider that their efforts will not be effective what lead to the cessation of the behavior.

The barriers can be thought of at policy level or environmental..There needs to be both personal motivation as well as enabling environment to practice and sustain those behaviors.

Yes Srinath, motivation and activation are inseparable aspects of health literacy! There are many barriers, as you said policy, environmental, but as well as social (community, culture have great influence). Sadly supermarkets have such a freedom nowadays and not focus on customers health, not many business want to corporate and send healthy messages to their customers. Ideally, if all community, policy, and markets work together I think we could reach good results.

Hello Rimante, your insight that improved knowledge does not make much/any difference the food industry happily embarked on when agreeing to food labels containing almost everything you want to know... makes no difference! So we need to move beyond barriers within the individual to those ones at community/society level and recognise that the individual is nowadays battling against influences much stronger than her. Help them by going beyond them and influence our policies!

Thank you Maximilian for your answer, I agree with you that we need to target policy. Community based interventions show great success in behavior change, as well as increase of the individual self-efficacy. I think policy should target market and media, there are no restrictions on advertisements (more than 50 percent of all ads are food, which are high in sugar and fat), some companies (of course not the healthiest ones) support schools or its events where they have a chance to promote their products to children and their parents. We should follow Sweden example, the Swedish media has minimum percentage of food ads. Government should developed proper strategies and restrictions for market and media ads.

Nutrition literacy means that people's literacy knowledge and calculating skills on diet and nutrition. For example; if people can read and understand information on food labels they will know which food healthy or not.

Its role is involved in those that are already not getting proper nutritional literacy.