Nutrition Guidelines Good: Now Back Them Up With Education

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) this week released the first new NRVs in 15 years.

Dr Haikerwal said the guidelines, which set out the variety of food needed to achieve optimum vitamin and mineral intakes - and recommend the ideal amount of calories for people at different stages of their life - would be useful for doctors and other health professionals.

However he said the AMA recommends that the best way for the general public to achieve optimum nutrition is through a varied, fresh diet.

"As Australians grow fatter and chronic diseases linked to obesity and poor nutrition become an increasing problem, it's great to finally have updated official recommendations for healthy eating," Dr Haikerwal said.

"But we need key nutrition messages to be made simple and clear enough for everybody to understand.

"The AMA has long been calling for the Government to devote dollars to improving nutritional literacy among the public.

"A smart and cost-effective strategy would be the provision of $10 million in next week's Federal Budget for a fully funded National Nutrition Centre and a genuine independent national nutrition survey, examining the diets of all parts of the population, from children to the elderly.

"Health professionals and the Government can't properly start to address poor nutrition unless we have hard evidence of the way people are actually eating."

Meanwhile, Dr Haikerwal applauded Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott's suggestion that takeaway food packaging should display the number of calories contained in the product.

"This would be an excellent move towards increasing the nutritional literacy among Australians," he said.

"It would be even more effective if it was accompanied by a national nutrition education campaign to make people aware of their ideal daily calorie intake and bring home the message that the key to healthy eating is a wide variety of fresh food."