Civic Dietetics

Two of the Cool Globes on display at Vancouver's Science World this past spring

Last month while doing a search on "environmental nutrition", I stumbled across the new-to-me concept of "civic dietetics":

Making food system issues integral to dietetic practice represents a transition for the professional, calling for new applications of skills and expertise. Drawing from the work of Thomas Lyson on civic agriculture, we propose civic dietetics to mean the application of dietetics to enhance public health by addressing food system structures, impacts, and policies and their relationship to food choices....

It can be argued that the economic, ecological, and social sustainability—the “triple bottom line”—of the food system, matters as much as the nutritional value of its products. Civic dietetics provides such a framework. [bolding added]

Source: Beyond Eating Right: The Emergence of Civic Dietetics to Foster Health and Sustainability Through Food System Change  by JL Wilkins, J Lapp,  A Tagtow & S Roberts in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2010.

Here are some other results from my recent Google search on "civic dietetics":

Civic dietetics: opportunities for integrating civic agriculture concepts into dietetic practice

Local and Healthy, 2 messages or 1?

Civic Dietetics, Community Gardening and Food Recovery

National Dietitian Day -- It's all about change!

Civic Markets and Alternative Agrofood Networks

This "cool globe", one of my favourites at the Science World display is called "cool careers". Made me think: perhaps "Civic Dietitian" is a new, evolving and essential role, if not career, for our times.

Tweeter's Digest: July edition

Well, hello there. Where has time gone? Until I checked my drafts folder earlier today, I hadn't realized I'd started writing 5 posts since mid-May. Time to finish & publish at least one of them.

Here's a round-up of resources I've shared on Twitter during the past couple of months:

Cancer Preventing Properties of Cruciferous Vegetables, a free full-text review article (PDF)

The total antioxidant content of more than 3100 foods, beverages, spices, herbs and supplements used worldwide, an open access, comprehensive database

Another reason to eat your beets: Nitrate in beetroot juice lowers blood pressure (original research article)

A recent, comprehensive review on dietary sodium & hypertension:  Blood Pressure Canada's background paper (PDF)

Salt Mountains, a compelling if not startling infographic on the prevalence of sodium in processed foods

How to cut down on sodium? Blood Pressure Canada says "Eat freshhhh!" and provides professional resources & educational tools on sodium on their well designed, informative web site.

Osteoporosis Canada recently released  new Vitamin D guidelines. 

After I read a thoughtful article on dietitians' roles in reducing food waste, on a whim I entered "don't waste food" into Google Images. The results included this classic poster from 1917: "Food - buy it with thought..."

Some further searching on "food waste" led to the excellent Love Food Hate Waste sites (main, Scotland, Wales, Australia). There's no Canadian version of this program -- yet -- but I'm hopeful.

I'll keep this list short, end here and give myself time to finish those other 4 posts. Perhaps I'll publish another one before the end of the summer, but the beans and beets take priority over words at this time of the season ;-).