Cristina et al.’s Article
The reviewed article is titled “Impact of an educational intervention using e-mail on diet quality,” which was published in the Nutrition and Food Science Journal. Its authors, Cristina et al. (2018), proposed a way to improve patients’ dietary habits in São Paulo, Brazil, by providing them with information via email. The process is described as follows: an automated system supplies participants with information on healthy eating at 24-hour intervals.
Evaluation is done by measuring DQI (Diet Quality Index). As a result of this intervention, the average DQI saw a moderate increase in most individuals, and a significant increase by 6.4 points in patients with the worst dieting habits. As such, the intervention can be considered successful, as it achieved both its health and educational goals.
Some of the factors necessary for evaluating individuals and community-based interventions focused primarily on participants’ health choices. The researchers analyzed which foods individuals were eating and how the pattern changed throughout the intervention. They did not evaluate how well the patients absorbed the information, whether their decisions were affected by what they were taught, or the degree to which this occurred (Cristina et al., 2018). There was no analysis of how the participants viewed the medium through which the knowledge was disseminated.
Freire’s Counterargument
The work of Paulo Freire criticized the contemporary approach to education that viewed individuals as vessels to be filled with knowledge. It also challenges the assumption that individuals’ actions are influenced mainly by their lack of knowledge rather than by the material world around them (Freire, 2021). In my opinion, the selected project goes contrary to Paulo Freire’s postulates, as it does not seek to address the reasons why people do not eat healthily and seems to operate on the assumption that ignorance is the only reason for the non-application of the principles of healthy eating.
Reference
Cristina, M. B. K., Silva, C. D., Henrique B. D., & Constante J. P. (2018). Impact of an educational intervention using e-mail on diet quality. Nutrition & Food Science, 44(5), 431-442.
Freire, P. (2021). Pedagogy of the heart. Bloomsbury Publishing.