Perspectives and strategies for effective nutrition education.

A prerequisite for a discussion of effective nutrition education is the establishment of the premise that nutrition is a specific and separate branch of the life sciences. The nutritionist must be similarly identifiable as having a distinct role and professional function. Recent discussions of the state of nutrition have been equivocal on this point: the Neuberger report (ARC/MRC Committee, 1974), for example, unfortunately stresses both the interdisciplinary nature of the subject and its functional relationship with medicine. A major problem, therefore, which nutritionists have as yet failed to solve in Britain is the need to establish this professional role and, in turn, to create an institutional framework within which some assessment of their relationship with associated disciplines may be made and the impact of nutritional education may be evaluated. One of the most remarkable aspects of the development of the science of nutrition earlier in this century was the receptivity of public opinion in Britain to its findings. The Ministry of Health first established an Advisory Committee on Nutrition as early as 1931. However, public attention focussed on nutritional problems in February 1933, when it was reported that rehousing families in Stockton-on-Tees was reducing dietary intake (M’Gonigle, 1933) and there appeared at the same time an emotive correspondence on the subject of ‘Hungry England’ (Week-End Review, 1933). In the following 5 years, numerous journals carried articles the essence of which was that the new science of nutrition had become a tool in the formulation of social policy. Pressure groups such as the Children’s Minimum Council and the Campaign Against Malnutrition were formed to highlight particular nutritional problems of the period and, in 1935, the Ministry of Health established a new Advisory Committee on Nutrition ‘to inquire into the facts, quantitative and qualitative, in relation to the diet of the people, and to report as to any changes therein which appear desirable in the light of modem advances in the knowledge of nutrition’. In its first report (Ministry of Health, 1937) the Committee recognized the need to apply ‘the lessons of recent nutritional science to the feeding of the nation’, perhaps one of the first nutritional education programnes. While much effort went into the collection of data, little of it had been analysed or could be acted upon before 1939; indeed, some of the schemes introduced, such as the provision of cheap school milk, were only partially implemented and reflected economic demands for the stabilization of milk prices by the producers rather than nutritional requirements (Carr-Saunders, 1937). Furthermore, in reading the debate nearly 40 years later, it is impossible to avoid feeling that public opinion seeking improved nutritional status found readier