By Fatou Saho
The Sun Business Network under the National Nutrition Agency in partnership with the World Food Program has built capacities of food entrepreneurs on dietary nutrition.
The capacity building, which brought business entrepreneurs, women and youth together, offered intensive training with demonstrations on processing healthy and quality food.
Haddy Crookes, the lead trainer and a senior program officer at NaNA, said it is important to have discussions on food safety and quality issues and ensure the nutritional problems are addressed.
She took the participants through processings of whole grain cereals for diet related non-communicable (NCD) disease, the risk factors, controllable and preventive measures.
She highlighted some of the common risk factors and the modifiable behavioral risk factors of non communicable diseases which she said include the use of tobacco, physical inactivity, harmful use of alcohol, unhealthy diet and made a clarification that risk factors such as overweight, obesity and HB pressure can be modified.
“We built their capacities in producing and marketing healthy food for prevention and management of diet related NCDs like diabetes or other diseases related to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. In order to avoid these, one needs to eat healthy to live healthy,” she emphasized.
The founder of Nature’s Gift Care and a participant, Ndey Awa Ceesay, expressed delight in being a participant of such a training. “Dietary nutrition is good but sometimes the society we live in makes it look bad and attaches fear to a healthy nutritional diet. I was born with weight and at some point, I made the decision that I was going to work on my diet to have a healthy body. I lose weight from 120 to 90 pounds but whoever sees me, asks if I was sick because to them losing weight made me look sick and unhealthy,” she narrated.
