The Ministry of Health held a nutrition seminar today for popular food providers around the city. It is in conjunction with the celebration of the annual Caribbean Nutrition Day. With an obesity rate of 60 percent countrywide, the Ministry's objective today was to educate these vendors about the basic nutrition principles of preparing a healthy meal.
Robyn Daly - Nutritionist Ministry of Health
"We're doing a nutrition seminar for food service providers. It is in recognition of Caribbean Nutrition day, which is celebrated June 1st. The overall objective for this training is to show and to educate the people that are preparing food for us, our food service providers. We have about 35 of them all over Belize City and we made sure we reached the very popular ones. So we have representation from Chon Saan, Li Chee, Kick Down Fence - some of our vendors that are on Coney Drive, Farmers Markey - where people access more or less everyday for lunch. We want to bring them out together and teach them about nutrition and what they need to know about our nutrition situation in Belize. They need to know how bad the situation is - looking at over 60% obesity rate in the country and looking at about 14% prominence of Diabetes, 28% of Hypertension - we need to reach out to the people that are preparing our food. We use these people every day to eat and they need to be trained in nutrition to prepare healthy meals for us."
The Ministry of Health plans on conducting follow up seminars in the near future with other food providers around the country.
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