Course ID: | NUTR(GLOB) 6280E. 3 hours. |
Course Title: | Global Health and Food Systems |
Course Description: | Explores complex relationships among food, culture, and disease through a food systems approach. Examines food policies at local, national, and global levels assessing their impact on health through phenomena such as child malnutrition, obesity, globalization of the Western Diet, food insecurity, food safety, food marketing, and the rise of diet-related noncommunicable diseases. |
Oasis Title: | Globl Hlth Food Sys |
Nontraditional Format: | This course will be taught 95% or more online. |
Semester Course Offered: | Offered spring semester every year. |
Grading System: | A-F (Traditional) |
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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, historical, economic, and evolutionary perspectives on food selection, taste, and preference.
3. Identify ways in which globalization has affected our food supply, food preferences, and access to food and current struggles to limit or constrain the global food system (e.g., slow food movement, food sovereignty, and food justice).
4. Evaluate the magnitude and complex nature of famine, food insecurity, and malnutrition and assess global efforts to address them, including World Food Summit; Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); and EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health.
5. Describe historical shifts in the human diet (e.g., the Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Agriculture, the Western Diet, the Nutrition Transition, and the health consequences involved with the spread of obesity across the globe).
6. Assess the global burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and the role of diet as a significant risk factor for NCDs.
7. Describe basic research techniques in the study of food and health, including anthropometry; growth standards; nutrient analysis; food frequency surveys; and 24-hour dietary recall.
8. Demonstrate skills to effectively communicate information via oral presentations and to collaboratively work in a group researching food system effects on health. |
Topical Outline: | -- Food System Perspective
-- Evidence for a Global Food System
-- Global Food System Challenges
-- Culture, Agriculture, and Food Justice
-- Nutrition and Malnutrition: Data, Measurement, and Assessment
-- Global Food Security and Malnutrition
-- Nutrition Transition and Global Trends in Obesity
-- Diet, Obesity, and Noncommunicable Diseases
-- Diet and Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases: Blue Zones, Mediterranean Diet and Ornish Lifestyle Medicine
-- Advertising and Marketing Food: The Commercial Determinants of Health
-- Global Food Policy: The Right to Food
-- Global Food Policy: Reshaping the Global Food System |