Nutritional enhancement involves adding health-promoting ingredients to food products, such as functional foods and nutraceuticals that address specific health concerns. Such supplements often include omega-3 fatty acids and probiotics for optimal performance.
Reformulating, or altering a product’s composition, can reduce salt and sugar while increasing healthy ingredients and nutrients to meet national dietary guidelines and promote positive diets and health outcomes. Reformulation is a proven approach to improve diets and health outcomes.
Wellness enhancement
Wellness enhancement entails using diet to promote and prevent disease, prompting an interest in functional foods and nutraceuticals that provide targeted health benefits through concentrated doses of nutrients or bioactive compounds. Omega-3 fatty acids may aid cardiovascular health while probiotics improve gut microflora.
Wellness programs encompass health assessments, education and awareness programs, exercise sessions, lifestyle management services and lifestyle modification elements to empower individuals to make healthier lifestyle decisions that lead to long-term wellbeing. They may offer educational resources, workshops and seminars on a range of subjects including healthy eating habits, stress management techniques and physical fitness regimens.
EnhanceWellness offers structured exercise activities like walking clubs and fitness challenges as well as strategies for increasing physical activity and decreasing sedentary time, all while building strong social networks among participants and making healthy living enjoyable. In fact, EnhanceWellness serves as a fantastic complement to traditional healthcare services for older adults, and has been proven to lead to positive health outcomes with demonstrable evidence.
Food technology
Food technology is an innovative field that utilizes cutting-edge science to enhance food production and preservation practices. Applications of this discipline include increasing nutritional profile of foods while developing functional ingredients; in addition, virus reduction processes may also be part of food technology practices.
Early research into food technology focused on preservation. Louis Pasteur’s discovery that heating could prevent microbial spoilage revolutionized the industry; while modern techniques like vacuum sealing and modified atmosphere packaging now extend shelf life without compromising taste or nutritional value.
For the planet to recover its bio-resources, a sustainable food system requires measures in all sectors of its supply chain. This involves changing consumers’ dietary choices, increasing use of sustainable ingredients and decreasing food waste. Nutritionists and food scientists and technologists must collaborate on creating solutions which are accepted by consumers while supporting healthier lifestyles – for instance creating food products suitable for them and supporting healthier lifestyles.
Accessibility
Accessibility refers to ensuring that people with disabilities can use products and services in similar ways as those without disabilities. This may involve physical access, such as elevators and Braille signs, as well as digital accessibility measures like making websites simpler to navigate for those with cognitive or mobility impairments.
Observational data demonstrate persistent inequities in accessing food and beverage sources that support healthy eating behaviors, including stores selling large quantities of FVs. These inequities correlate to social and economic gradients; communities of color and individuals living in lower-income neighborhoods are less likely to find stores selling FVs compared to their counterparts living in more affluent neighborhoods.
Attaining equity requires increasing accessibility through policy and practice interventions, including broad policies to address socioeconomic differences outlined by the Getting to Equity Framework as well as targeted interventions geared specifically at helping communities – one such targeted intervention being providing accurate synchronized captions on video content that benefits not only those deaf or hard-of-hearing but also noisy environments, language learners, individuals with auditory processing disorders, etc.
Socio-economic inequalities
Socioeconomic inequalities refer to an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities within societies, caused by power dynamics, social stratification and modern capitalism itself.
Simply stated, socio-economic inequality refers to any discrepancy in resources between those with access to plenty and those struggling. It includes wealth and income as well as education and health.
Diet inequality among segments of the population contributes significantly to health disparities and can be affected by many factors, including access to nutritious food sources, health behaviors, food prices and shopping patterns.
At a time of growing global inequality, policy interventions that target the most marginalized groups are necessary. Such efforts should aim to increase consumption of nutrient-rich foods like oily fish, fruit and vegetables while supporting better diet behaviours, choices, and intake. Public Health Nutrition’s articles this issue highlight potential avenues for such responses, including one using reverse mediation to examine pathways by which SEP affects diet quality – just one possible avenue that might work.
