Healthy Eating

The Population & Public Health Program works with partners across the province to promote healthy eating.

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Our activities

The Population and Public Health Program works with partners at PHSA and a variety of stakeholders across the province to promote healthy eating by:

  • Facilitating dialogue and partnering with other sectors to identify problems, implement solutions and evaluate impact of healthy eating initiatives and programs
  • Providing timely, credible and relevant information and resources on healthy eating
  • Supporting the development of food literacy by encouraging the sharing of food, food skills, practices and knowledge, within and across communities 
  • Supporting the creation of food environments that provide opportunities to make healthy food choices where British Columbians live, learn, work and play
  • Informing and influencing nutrition policy development

Our current focus areas include:

  • Coordinating the development of provincial healthy eating resources using a culturally safe and health equity lens
  • Increasing food literacy through the delivery of the Food Skills for Families program
  • Identifying gaps in nutrition knowledge and assessing needs for nutrition resources in public health and primary care
  • Managing Informed Dining in Health Care

Provincial healthy eating resource development

In collaboration with the BC Ministry of Health, HealthLinkBC, First Nations Health Authority and the regional health authorities, we manage the development of provincial healthy eating resources for health professionals, educators and the general public, which include but are not limited to the following:

 

The BC Pediatric Nutrition Guidelines (Birth to Six Years) for Health Professionals are evidence-informed nutrition and feeding guidelines for healthy full-term infants and children from birth to six years of age. Health professionals can use the guidelines to provide high-quality care related to feeding and to identify potential nutrition risk. The BC Pediatric Nutrition Guidelines (Birth to Six Years) for Health Professionals were updated December 2022..

 

 
Teach Food First is a toolkit for educators developed by the BC Ministry of Health and the BC Centre for Disease Control in partnership with public health dietitians, BC teachers, and Indigenous Knowledge Keepers. 

The toolkit promotes a food exploration approach that supports life-long eating competence as a key goal for nutrition education for students in grades K-8.  It includes:

  • Practical tips for educators 
  • Grade-specific lessons that connect to BC curriculum 
  • Lessons that explore Indigenous foods and the lands, waters and forests they come from 
  • Answers to frequently asked questions about teaching Canada’s food guide
  • Suggested responses to common questions students ask about nutrition
  • Additional activities and educator resources

 

This interactive course is intended to support health care providers in understanding and navigating our complex relationships with food. You'll learn practical skills to make your conversations about food sensitive, relevant, and practical.

Beyond Nutrition is grounded in the evidence-based recommendations of Canada's Food Guide and provides an overview of the key points and more recent research around food and nutrition.

 

Provincial healthy eating programs

BCCDC manages the following healthy eating programs:

 

Food Skills for Families (FSF) is a hands-on skill building program developed by dietitians and educators. It is offered as a six-session, community centred program. It strives to create welcoming environments where food, food knowledge, practices, skills and traditions are shared amongst and between participants and FSF facilitators. With a focus on developing healthy relationships with and through food, the program engages the following priority populations: lower income, newcomers, Punjabi, Indigenous and seniors. All participants experience the rich social benefits of cooking and eating together while learning and sharing cooking skills, food knowledge and basic nutrition.

 
 


Reports & resources

Evidence Brief: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Scope & Effectiveness of Food Literacy Interventions on Food Literacy - 2024  

Background: Food Skills for Families is a 16-year-old program (2008) with minimal to no curriculum updates. We acknowledge the program could better support communities with more flexible and up to date content, format and delivery options. To help inform this update, a scoping review was conducted to identify the types of intervention components and outcomes in food literacy intervention literature. 

​Key findings/key messages:
  • Community-based interventions to improve food literacy and promote healthy eating are a popular strategy in public health, however there is a gap in knowledge on best practices for food literacy interventions. We conducted a systematic scoping review of food literacy program evaluations to inform updates to the BC Centre for Disease Control’s Food Skills for Families program.
  • Most food literacy interventions focus on improving individuals’ food, nutrition and cooking knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Fewer interventions focus on the environments, social factors or systems that shape individuals’ decisions about food. 
  • ​The outcomes of food literacy interventions were very mixed. There is some evidence that food literacy interventions improve food and nutrition knowledge and cooking skills and shift some related attitudes, but these changes do not lead to consistent changes in eating and cooking practices or result in observable health changes.
  • Including a focus on environments in systems in program design and evaluating the impact of programs on those outcomes would r​espond to gaps in our understanding of the effectiveness of food literacy programs.

Informed Dining in Health Care Evaluation

In 2017, an evaluation of Informed Dining in Health Care was conducted to assess the impact of the program on health care food retail customers. The evaluation was led by the Population and Public Health Program at BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), in consultation with the BC Ministry of Health and food services representatives from the regional health authorities. Released April 2018 



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