Health Promotion (PY4010)
What is health promotion?
Empowering patients to draw up their own health promotion agendas - a widely used
umbrella term for a range of approaches including:
- Educating people to help them make informed choices about their health
- Providing services to identify people at early risk and preventing more serious
problems
- Protecting the public’s health by regulations and policies intended to make healthier
choices easier to make
Health promotion specialists
Public health practitioners who specialise in a particular area, e.g. smoking, alcohol, drug
misuse.
Public health practitioner roles differ greatly in their focus and specific job titles. For example,
a teenage pregnancy coordinator, smoking cessation advisor, and public health nutritionist
all do completely different jobs.
Healthy diet
Starchy foods and fruit/vegetables should provide the bulk of meals.
About ⅓ of your diet should be made up from starchy foods, and about ⅓ from fruit and
vegetables. The remaining ⅓ should be made up from milk/dairy foods, proteins, and a small
amount reserved for sugary foods.
The EatWell Plate serves as a guide for eating healthily but shouldn’t be followed precisely
as everybody’s needs are different.
The NICE guidelines’ advice follows the EatWell Plate’s recommendations based on their
description of what a healthy diet consists of.
The NICE guidelines with regards to healthy eating reduces CVD risk: reduce intake of sugar
and refined-sugar-containing foods including fructose; eat at least 5 portions of fruit/veg per
day; eat at least 2 portions of fish per week, including 1 portion of oily fish; eat at least 4-5
portions of unsalted nuts, seeds, and legumes per week; and choose wholegrain varieties of
starchy foods.
Obesity
Describes somebody who is very overweight with a high degree of body fat.
Number of ways in which this can be assessed, e.g. BMI (kg divided by height in metres
squared), waist circumference.
If BMI = 25-29 the person is overweight. If BMI = 30-40 the person is obese. If BMI = over 40
the person is very obese, aka morbidly obese.
If waist circumference (WC) is 80 cm or more in women or 94 cm or more in men, the person
is more likely to develop obesity-related health problems. Place tape measure around waist
at belly button and walk around patient to measure WC.