A four step health promotion approach for changing dietary patterns in Europe.

Nutrition policies to prevent nutrition-related diseases already exist in many countries. Not many countries have been successful in implementing their dietary recommendations, mainly because of the individual focus of nutrition education policies. Experts have been telling people what foods are good for them but have failed to build a supportive environment which would enable people to exercise a healthy choice. This article identifies four steps to a new approach for nutrition promotion. It is based on the idea that a multi-disciplinary approach and promotional activities linked to existing social networks on an individual level close to daily life will be more effective than traditional nutrition education. As an example in this field the SUPER-project, a community based five-country nutrition promotion project is described. This project, based on the four steps described in the article, is being carried out in five different experimental situations to produce a working model for this approach.