Sukalmena InAge: Nutritional-culinary Programme to Promote Adherence to a Healthy Dietary Pattern.

Overview

Currently, one of the main health challenges of public health is to improve the quality of life of people with chronic non-communicable diseases, through new strategies that promote healthy eating habits and lifestyles. Within the new strategies that aim to promote and improve the eating habits of the population, "Sukalmena-InAge" is proposed as a tool for transforming health, where culinary skills and nutritional knowledge converge as a new paradigm to promote health. The merging of culinary knowledge and nutritional education has been coined under the term Culinary Medicine. The present project is presented as an innovative strategy to improve dietary habits of overweight/obese people. To this end, volunteers will participate in an intervention that will be based on cooking workshops and nutritional education. In this sense, participants will receive different cooking and nutritional education sessions in order to be able to give them resources to cook in an easy, enjoyable and healthy way. The study will evaluate the effect that this nutritional-culinary intervention programme might exert on health and will compare these results with the effects obtained providing a more traditional nutritional education. The potential effects will be evaluated through the measurement of specific biochemical parameters related to the most prevalent chronic diseases ( insulin, glucose, total cholesterol, triglycerides, among others). In addition, the measurement of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in tissue will be carried out. High consumption of AGEs, could induce negative effects on health and has been correlated with the type of food consumed, but also with the culinary techniques used for their preparation.

Lifestyle interventions are nowadays focused on promoting health and preventing chronic diseases. However, when it comes to changing lifestyle habits, and more specifically, dietary habits, the acquisition and maintenance of these modifications over time is often complex due to many factors that may affect. There is a consensus among health professionals that, based on the available scientific evidence, a diet based on a high consumption of fruit and vegetables is inversely associated with the risk of developing chronic non-communicable diseases and, overall, with lower mortality rates. These protective effects might be in part due to certain nutrients present in the mentioned foods, namely biologically active compounds or bioactive compounds, such as mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids, fibre, phytochemicals, antioxidant vitamins, minerals, ω-3 fatty acids and plant proteins. These compounds exert antiinflammatory and antioxidant effects, thus, as part of a healthy dietary pattern, they may have the capacity to preserve healthy ageing, for instance, in relation to cognitive status. Nevertheless, the role of culinary methods from a healthy dietary perspective should not be forgotten. During culinary processes the nutrient content can be modified, contributing not only to the loss or enhancement of beneficial nutrients such as biologically active components (CBAs), but also to the formation of compounds that might be harmful or toxic for the human organism, for example, Advanced Glycation End Products (AGEs). Taking this into consideration, this study seeks to develop a pilot study to analyse the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of a nutritional-culinary programme aiming to promote long-term healthy ageing in overweight or obese adults. Volunteers participating in the intervention will receive nutritional recommendations based on a healthy dietary pattern such as Mediterranean Diet, together with a culinary training, seeking to empower them in cooking techniques and culinary capacities. In conclusion, this study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a nutritional-culinary intervention to produce beneficial effects on health parameters of overweight/obese patients and to compare the results obtained with the health effects obtained through a nutritional intervention without a culinary training.