Take call to study nutrition seriously

A RECENT news article (Tuesday’s The National) quoted Helen Palik, a technical officer in the Health Department who is responsible for nutrition and dietetics, that proposals for nutrition education courses were “put aside due to lack of infrastructure”.
The Government needs to take this seriously as poor food quality causes a massive increase in the national health budget.
Sometime last year, Prof Sir Isi Kevau said something about the very high cost of treating diseases caused by poor nutrition and blocking of blood vessels.
He said: “We used to live on natural produce and food like fish, vegetables, yams, bananas and sago and other traditional foods.
“Now, with the change in lifestyle, we have come up with all these lifestyle diseases that we talk about that are blocking our blood vessels.”
Sir Isi said diabetes, kidney failure, heart attack, stroke and cancer were new noninfectious diseases that emerged as a result of the lifestyle of the people
He said lifestyle diseases were expensive to treat and “when one comes in with a heart attack, we have to give medication and the first dose we give to stabilise it costs K42,000 for one dose”.
Massive increases in health expenditure can be saved by addressing nutrition and by making people aware of the high cost of treating diseases caused by the lack of awareness of good food as opposed to lamb flaps, fried chicken and potato chips.
Oils used in frying food are described as “slow poison” by some nutrition experts.
What is stopping the University of PNG and Divine Word University from teaching nutrition and good food in their medical courses?
This would provide doctors with information to advice patients on quality food, which is often PNG garden food.
Make doctors aware of the huge cost of treating diseases caused by poor nutrition and how that consuming good food could help the country.
Newcastle University and many British universities are teaching nutrition to medical students and how good nutrition could provide better health to the general public and reduce the national health budget.

Ajit Muttu