Culture, eating behavior, and infectious disease control and prevention
- PDF / 1,378,390 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 11 Downloads / 206 Views
Journal of Ethnic Foods
REVIEW ARTICLE
Open Access
Culture, eating behavior, and infectious disease control and prevention Mingzhu Zhou1,2, Na Zhang1,2, Man Zhang1,2 and Guansheng Ma1,2*
Abstract Humans need to obtain nutrients from foods for survival and health. Culture and belief play important roles in food selection and intake. Throughout human history, dietary factor has been one of the important factors inducing and causing outbreaks of infectious diseases. If unhealthy eating behavior, like eating raw/undercooked food or meat and products from wild animals, are not abandoned, foodborne infectious diseases will remain an important risk factor of outbreaks and epidemics. The misconception of dietary culture is one of the important factors that triggers unhealthy eating behavior. Therefore, it is vital to change people’s conceptions and knowledge about what is healthy to eat, in order to completely eliminate unhealthy eating behavior and prevent the recurrence of foodborne infectious diseases. Meanwhile, many factors such as family, society, region, and religion should be involved in. Keywords: Culture, Eating behavior, Infectious diseases
Background Infectious diseases threaten the health of human beings and bring a serious burden of disease as well [1]. Potential pathogens causing infectious diseases are various, including prion, bacteria, viruses, fungi, rickettsia, spirochete, and parasites [2, 3]. It is estimated that 17 million people die worldwide each year from infectious diseases [4]. Collectively, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, and neglected tropical diseases accounted for an estimated 4.3 million deaths in 2016 [5]. Certainly, the emergence and transmission of infections is usually linked with a number of factors [6], such as age [7], gender [8], occupation [9], education level [10], personal behavior [11], climate [12], geographical condition [13], hygienic condition, economic condition [14], massive urbanization, and cultural custom. Since the twenty-first century, a total of seven public health emergencies have been identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as Public Health Emergency of International * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Nutrition and Food Hygiene, School of Public Health, Peking University, 38 Xue Yuan Road, Hai Dian District, Beijing 100191, China 2 Laboratory of Toxicological Research and Risk Assessment for Food Safety, Peking University, 38 Xue Yuan Road, Hai Dian District, Beijing 100191, China
Concern (PHEIC), and five of them were associated with eating factors. Thus, it can be seen that eating behavior plays a significant part in the occurrence of infectious diseases. It is meaningful to change people’s conceptions and knowledge about dietary culture and eating behavior.
Changes in dietary culture and eating behavior Before human beings learned to use fire, they had spent a long time in the dark. In the primitive life of picking and hunting, everything they ate was raw and grasped directly by hand, including birds and animals, clams an
Data Loading...
