Nutrition Workshop

January 29th, 2016 by | Tags: , | No Comments »

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Last October, I did a Nutrition Workshop for a small group of persons with disabilities.  When doing workshops on various health topics, I normally give each workshop more than once so that I can reach out to as many people as possible.  However, for this workshop, I did it only once because the workshop produced unsatisfying results that led me to decide not to give anymore workshops until if I could come up with a solution that can produce better results.

Nutrition was a very complicated topic to educate.  The goal of the workshop was to improve participants’ knowledge of how to eat good well-balanced and healthy meals.  When I did my community needs assessment a year ago, I found that about two-thirds of all people who I interviewed do not eat well-balanced diet regularly.  This means that the majority rarely or never eat vitamins and minerals which includes fruits and vegetables and many also rarely eat proteins such as meat, fish, beans or dairy.  Everyone reported that they always eat carbohydrates, which is the primary staple of their diet.  Carbohydrates include yam, potatoes, plantains, cassava, spaghetti and bread.  Financial reasons is one of many factors as meat is often unaffordable for many persons with disabilities who are unemployed or struggle to earn money.  Access to food is another reason.  Many persons with disabilities in particular those with mobility and visual issues cannot go far due to the distance from their home to the market being too far.  Many taxi drivers will not take persons with disabilities because they do not want to make the effort to assist them in getting into the car.  Also, many markets are inaccessible to those who are in wheelchairs due to narrow aisles.  Also, most of those who are deaf cannot communicate with the vendors to negotiate the prices.  Another main reason is also because of lack of knowledge.  For example, in Bamenda, bananas, mangoes, avocados, onions and tomatoes are plentiful but for some persons with disabilities who have the ability to go to the market or have family members who go to the market for them, fruits and vegetables are just still not part of their regular diet.

At the workshop, I educated the participants on the importance of eating well-balanced diet meals and eating food from all three categories: carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins and minerals.  I presented the “Food House” which is similar to the food pyramid.  I explained to them how each type of nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins and minerals impact our body.  I explained what happens to our body when we eat or do not eat food from each type of nutrients.  I shared various diseases that we can develop as a result of not eating food from one or more of the categories  We did a hands on demonstration where I presented cut outs of various food and asked the participants to place each food in each category on the poster of “Food House.”

foodhouse

When doing the demonstration, the participants exhibited struggles in being able to identify how each food impacts our body.  Then when they did the post-test, while they were able to define correctly each different types of food, carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins and minerals, they were not able to correctly identify which food belongs to which category.  Also, none of them except for one correctly responded that they must eat food from all three categories in order to maintain a well-balanced diet.

Because the post-tests showed no improvements from the pre-tests and participants exhibited struggles in understanding the information, I decided that it is best not to move forward in giving more nutrition workshops to other groups until I can figure out how I can improve in educating people about nutrition and figure out the best approach in helping them understand the information.  I realize that using complex vocabulary terms and scientific information to a group of people who have received little to no schooling is challenging.  Thus, I need to figure out how I can help them understand the necessary complex information.

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