Chris Kresser: Number five, “I’m trying to build a program in my community for children and adolescents in order to educate them about healthy nutrition, easy tools to access and implement in their current lifestyle.” That’s awesome Daniela. I’m happy to hear that. “What resources do you recommend and/or points to consider in creating this training program? I’m posting this question on the Facebook group, but I wanted to have your input or opinion on it.”
I think a couple things to consider is, one is education and information are awesome, and they’re an important part of the overall package of changing people’s behavior, but information is not enough to change behavior on its own, and that’s just true for children and adolescents as it is for adults. Including some kind of coaching intervention or behavioral change intervention that’s part of what you’re doing I think would be a huge factor in increasing its chances of success because if information were enough, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in. We can argue about the dietary guidelines and whether they’re appropriate or not. I don’t think that they are, but it’s not the case that everyone is following the dietary guidelines and not getting results. A very small percentage of people are following the dietary guidelines, and it’s not because they don’t know them. It’s because behavior change is hard. I think the statistics from the CDC in the United States suggests that only 6 percent of Americans engage in the top five health behaviors that the CDC has identified. These are very basic things like not smoking cigarettes, not drinking excessively, maintaining a healthy body weight, and getting adequate amounts of physical activity. We’re not talking about more advanced kind of stuff that we do discuss. We’re talking about just the very very basics. You have only 6 percent of Americans following that, and it’s not because they don’t know that those are healthy choices. It’s because we live in a modern environment that is antithetical to health, and it is essentially challenging our hardwired vulnerabilities and tendencies at every turn whether we’re talking about the effects of artificial light on our circadian rhythms and sleep, chronic stress and its impact on sleep and metabolism, or the proliferation of ultra processed, highly refined food that triggers our hedonic and homeostatic food mechanism where it just promotes overeating in a way that human beings are not really— that it’s hard for us to protect against because we evolved in an environment where seeking out calorie dense and highly rewarding food would have been a survival advantage, and we never had access to it like we do now.
There are so many influences that work against making healthy choices, which is why I’ve become such a huge advocate for health coaching and for focusing on behavior change because you look at just the last 30 or 40 years and the proliferation of diet books every year, different diets, all kinds of fad diets like, that the latest is the carnivore diet. Next year it’ll be
kresserinstitute.com
another one. That all comes from just the difficulty of sustaining change over a long period of time. That would be the most important comment I think. The other thing would just be keeping it as simple as possible. Depending on your what your community is like and what the demographic is and the socioeconomic status of people in the community, you have to consider where they are starting from. If it’s a community with lower socioeconomic status, less awareness and education about nutrition, then going in with a 30-day Paleo reset is probably not the right idea. Starting with reducing intake of sugar and industrialized seed oils, and flour, I mean, if you could just do those three things, you’re going to be a gigantic win. Never mind, again, the more advanced stuff that we talk about. Keeping it simple and then including some kind of behavioral intervention I think would be my two recommendations.