Overnutrition in Samoa

Over the past term, I was enrolled in FNH 455 (Applied International Nutrition). A big part of the course focused on a final project that I had to on with my team. The aim of the project was that we had to design a nutrition intervention in any region of our choice. When first discussing possible regions to choose an intervention for, we had thought of the obvious: tackling undernutrition in a less “developed” region. One of our team members had thought it would be interesting if we targeted overnutrition rather than undernutrition, a suggestion we had not really thought about until then. As was evident, our group was the only one in the class that chose this approach. We had set on creating a regional intervention in a rural area in Samoa, which has one of the largest rates of Non-communicable diseases in the world; these NCDs include obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and hyperglycaemia. The intervention we chose focused on taking a three-pronged approach: nutrition education, community cooking, and physical exercise. We eventually decided against using a control for our intervention, as our approach been repeatedly shown to be effective in targeting overnutrition. The entire experience was very different for me, largely because I had spent the past two years focusing on ways to tackle undernutrition – we often times forget that there a whole number of issues that people on the opposite end of the scale are also facing in regards to food.