ARTS , CULTURE & EDUCATION
Drafting the recipe for a new northern diet Northern Nutrition I
t is an understatement to point out that lifestyles among Inuit in Nunavut have changed
dramatically in just a couple of generations. Nothing less than a radical transformation has altered the lives of a nomadic people who have traditionally thrived on physical exercise, fresh air, and a diet exclusively based on highly nutritious foods from the land and sea. Those foods — and an unprecedented
array of store-bought foods that now arrive in the North on planes and boats — lie at the heart of this transformation. As the traditional “country” food has been displaced to different degrees in many people’s diet, many of the new items on the menu are revealing them- selves to be poor substitutes.
Nor does it help that human beings appear
to be hard-wired to prefer salty, sweet, and fatty foods. Such foods arrive without any cultural context in the North, where there has been no experience passed from generation to generation about how such products should be consumed. Instead, people simply follow their preference for some of the less healthy choices, which drives up rates of obesity,
malnutrition, and other related conditions. 48
arcticjournal.ca
Jennifer Wakegijig, Nunavut’s Territorial Nutritionist, is working with her colleagues on a variety of initiatives to address this problem. Their efforts emphasize the value of traditional foods, while also underlining the importance of making the healthiest possible choices when store-bought foods are chosen. This work led to the recent release of a new edition of the Nunavut Food Guide, the result of two years’ effort examining the latest health evidence and feedback from community focus groups.
While the guide is intended to have plain language messaging that is accessible to the general public, it has been designed as a valuable teaching tool for teachers, nurses, and other health professionals. “It’s a clear, plain language tool that has all
kinds of key health messages related to food and eating and family health,” says Wakegijig, noting that she would especially like to see it in the hands of the territory’s community health workers. “These are local community members who may not have very much formal training, who do health promotion program- ming, such as providing cooking classes and other nutrition education in communities.”
March/April 2012 “The hope that we can shift the tides in
peoples’ eating habits rests with those community workers and we need to invest in them,” adds Wakegijig, who describes them as front-line workers whose work has
the
potential to prevent many of the health calamities that have devastated aboriginal communities elsewhere in Canada. Diabetes
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