Course Description
Explore complex relationships among food, culture, and disease through a food systems approach. Focus on taste and food preferences, nutritional perspectives, globalization of Western diet, along with obesity and chronic disease, and global food policy issues, such as food insecurity, food marketing and trade, and ethics of food waste.
Athena Title
Global Health and Food
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in GLOB 3200E, GLOB 3200S
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
1. Apply a systems approach to public health nutrition, i.e., conceptualize the global food system as encompassing all the activities and resources that go into producing, distributing, and consuming food; the drivers and outcomes of those processes; and all the relationships and feedback loops between system components. 2. Explain cultural and evolutionary perspectives on food selection, taste, and preference. 3. Articulate the complex interconnection between food, economics, and health. 4. Identify ways in which globalization has affected our supply, preferences, and access to food. 5. Evaluate the magnitude and complex nature of global challenges involving food insecurity and malnutrition and ways to address them. 6. Describe the western diet and the consequences involved with the spread of obesity across the globe. 7. Characterize the phenomenon of globalization and how it applies to diet and health. 8. Demonstrate skills to effectively communicate information via oral presentations and work collaboratively in a group to discuss food and health. 9. Apply public health and social science research techniques to the study of food and health.
Topical Outline
• Food systems perspective, i.e., links between production, distribution, and marketing with public health • Is there a global food system? Institutions and Actors • Food culture and society: How and why we form our food tastes and preferences • Evolutionary Perspectives: What are humans supposed to eat? • Eating Close to Home: Local foods, wild foods, and foraging • The True Costs of Cheap Food: Are fast, convenient foods worth the cost to our health? • Chronic Disease and Diet: Obesity, Diabetes, the Overfed and the Under-nourished • The Globalization of Food: Exporting the Western Diet and Western Diseases • Global Problems: Overnutrition versus Undernutrition • Healthy Diets and Global Models for Healthy Eating: Mediterranean Diet, Paleo Diet, “Blue Zones” of diet-based longevity, Ornish Reversal Program
Syllabus