Human Ecology, Nutrition and Chronic Diseases

Recommended Prerequisites

The students should be able to read the bibliography in English.

Teaching Methods

Lectures with exposition of the program with discussion with the students. Students are motivated always to participate in the class doing the biocultural perspective that food have for human populations.

Learning Outcomes

This course considers nutrition from an anthropological perspective. An anthropological perspective includes both the biological and cultural aspects of nutrition across place and time. Nutrition plays a major role in health, wellness, and disease of human populations and their study will be contextualized in an ecological perspective.  Additionally, this course includes the study of cross-cultural variation in diet, nutritional status and subsistence systems as well as variation in these factors over the evolutionary course of human existence, from prehistoric and historic to modern times. The process of nutritional transition and globalization of modern  nutritional patterns, and their role in the etiology of chronic diseases in modern societies, will be studied as well.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

- Introduction: the biocultural view of human nutrition

- Evolution of human diet: from paleolithic, agriculture and industrialization

- Origin and evolution of the western diet: health implications for the 21th century

- Food as health a determinant of health

- Twelve steps to healthy eating: World Health Organization guidelines

- Mediterranean diet

- Nutritional transition, globalization and its effects in chronic diseases of human modern societies

Head Lecturer(s)

Fernando José Pereira Florêncio

Assessment Methods

Assessment
The evaluation will be carried out by one essay but the topic must have the approval of the staff involved in the curricular unit. The work will be present first through an oral presentation following a discussion with all the students. The aim is to help the student to improve the work. After that the students must written work.: 100.0%

Bibliography

Bryant, CA: DeWalt, KM; Courtney, A; Schwartz, J. 2003. The Cultural Feast. An Introduction to Food and Society. Second Edition. Thomson and Wadsworth, USA.

Kawachi, I; Wamala, S. 2007. Globalization and Health. Oxford University Press.

Marmot, M; Wilkinson, RG. 2006. Social Determinants of Health. Second Edition. Oxford University Press.

Lindberg, S. 2010. Food and Western Disease. Health and Nutrition from and Evolutionary Perspective. Wiley-Blakwell.