to your health

To Your Health: National Nutrition Month

Mar 21, 2023 | 5:09 AM

PRINCE GEORGE — March is national nutrition month, and we learn how to maintain proper nutrition and healthy eating in this week’s to your health.

National nutrition month takes place every year, but every year there is a different theme, and 2023 is no different. Emilia Moulechkova with Northern Health says that this year’s theme for national nutrition month is “Unlock the Potential for Food”. She says it “highlights the many ways that dietitians can use their knowledge and skills around food and nutrition to support the health of individuals and communities.”

Having a positive relationship with food, is a huge part of maintaining good nutrition.

“We strongly believe that enjoying food, foods that you you like and foods that are culturally important to you without guilt and shame, as well as having a positive relationship with food, is actually foundational to health and healthy eating. And most of those messages that we hear that promote restriction, placing moral values on food or food choices or those usually come from diet culture, and they’re not grounded in evidence based or meaningful advice for individuals and communities.” – Emilia Moulechkova, Northern Health

In order to know what healthy eating looks like, it is important to define what healthy eating is. Moulechkova says that Northern Health defines healthy eating as “getting enough nutritious and tasty food for daily living and wellness.”

“This also recognizes that healthy eating is more than just individual choices and includes things like eating competence. So your food attitudes and food skills, your culture and tradition, social aspects of eating, as well as food systems and foods and food security.” – Emilia Moulechkova, Northern Health

Healthy eating and maintaining proper nutrition will look different to everyone.

“The message is that healthy eating looks different to everybody. It’s influenced by your personal preferences, your health conditions that may require you to make changes to your diet, your living situation, your cultural context, your access to resources such as time, money and a grocery store and those types of things.” – Emilia Moulechkova, Northern Health