Madam

Are we Australian public health nutritionists up a gum tree? Well, from there you can see the bigger picture and get a good view of the galahs. Yes, we need to do better, get more proactive, and apply the leadership necessary to address inequalities in the world⁽Reference Cannon¹⁾. Yes, public health nutrition does need to be marked out as an important discipline unconstrained by the medical paradigm.

I do however take issue with the proposition that teachers and practitioners generally seem content to identify the discipline as a branch of clinical nutrition. That certainly hasn’t been my experience. Over ten years ago, in an effort to distinguish public health nutrition from the clinical approaches to nutrition prevalent in Australia at the time, I proposed with a colleague a definition of public health nutrition that seems very consistent with the New Nutrition Science⁽Reference Hughes and Somerset²⁾.

‘Public health nutrition is the art and science of promoting population health status via sustainable improvements in the food and nutrition system. Based upon public health principles, it is a set of comprehensive and collaborative activities, ecological in perspective and inter-sectoral in scope, including environmental, educational, economic, technical and legislative measures’⁽Reference Leitzmann and Cannon³⁾.

The ‘newness’ of the New Nutrition Science is not so important as the underlying principles. How we view and describe our discipline is important, but not more important than what we do under this disciplinary banner. Action speaks more than words.