Define the Public Nutrition

Public nutrition is concerned with improving nutrition in populations in both poor and industrialized countries, linking with continuity and public health nutrition and complementary disciplines. You would note that public nutrition is an applied and very vast field. It includes many activities as follows:

• An understanding and a raising awareness of the nature, causes and consequences of nutrition problems in society,
• Epidemiology, containing surveillance, monitoring, and evaluation,
• Nutritional requirements and dietary guidelines for populations,
• Programmes and interventions: their planning, design, management and evaluation,
• Community nutrition and community-based programmes,
• Public education, especially nutrition education for behavioural change,
• Timely warning and prevention and mitigation of emergencies, including the use of emergency food aid,
• Advocacy and linkage with, for example, population and environmental concerns, and
• Public policies and programmes relevant to nutrition in several sectors, for example, economic health, agriculture development, and education.

So we saw that public nutrition is a very vast field and has many aspects to it. We will now study in detail about the concept, scope of public nutrition and the future projections of this field.