Norwegian Action Plan on Nutrition (2007–2011): Recipe for a Healthier Diet.

The Action Plan Recipe for a healthier diet applies to the period 2007–2011 and shall serve as a tool for decision-makers, professionals, experts and others in the public and private sectors and NGOs that play a role in the population’s diet. Its main goals are to change the diet in line with the recommendations of the health authorities and to reduce social inequalities in diet.
To help eliminate malnutrition, the action plan focuses on five strategies: 1. Improve the availability of healthy food products. To this end efforts will focus on; encouraging product development of healthy food products and meals; establishing a dialogue forum for cooperation between the food industry, authorities, researchers and consumers; promoting increased consumption of fruit and vegetables by stimulating increased access to high quality products from the primary producers; strengthening collaboration between authorities, fishing industry and retailers to increase the availability of fish and seafood of good quality; restructuring of the tax on non-alcoholic beverages; study the possibilities of the use of economic incentives to promote a healthy diet; work to improve labelling of food products, including better nutritional declaration; aim to introduce symbol labelling to make it easier to put together a healthy diet; fortification of foods and food supplements; consider introduction of restrictions on advertising unhealthy food aimed at children and young people; healthy meals in kindergartens and schools and workplaces.
2. Consumer knowledge. To this end, efforts will focus on developing and implementing a comprehensive plan for information and communication work in the nutrition area, specifying the official dietary guidelines, implementing campaign for promoting the consumption of fish and other seafood, publishing a basic cookery book for everyday use in the population, further developing the web site www.matportalen.no with respect to nutrition and diet, awarding of the Nutrition Prize, and establishing a dialogue forum at the national level between authorities, NGOs and relevant private actors.
3- Qualifications of key personnel. Efforts will focus on offering a basic cookery book in free of charge to pupils at the lower secondary level and to education majors; developing and offering web-based educational programmes for use in primary school; encouraging allocating resources for practical training in Food and Health; stimulating establishment of continuing and further education programmes in nutrition and diet; assessing needs and possibilities for strengthening nutrition in relevant curricula; and considering future needs for nutrition specialists in the health service.
4. Local basis of nutrition-related activities. To this end, efforts will focus on emphasizing nutrition considerations as part of public health initiatives in counties and municipalities; facilitating capacity building in university college programmes for public health workers in primary and secondary education; developing good indicators in nutrition and public health that are included in municipal health profiles; Continuing nutrition and diet initiatives together with physical activity and anti-tobacco programmes as a priority focus in partnerships for public health; Collecting, communicating and if necessary developing tools and models for nutrition activities; Coordinating and channeling incentive funds from various national food, diet, physical activity and health programmes to local measures.
5. Strengthen focus on nutrition in health care services by preparing suitable diet and nutrition-related quality indicators in the health institutions and home-based services; Survey food services, diet and nutritional status of users of nursing and care services; Ensure that food services and facilitation of meals are included in authorities’ inspection of the health service and nursing and care services; Develop further patient training programmes through Centres for Learning and Coping and other means; Continue to develop low-threshold dietary-related schemes; Develop informational materials and tools aimed at changing habits including diet for use by the health service, patients/users and relatives.
Regarding governance, the Directorate for Health and Social Affairs and the Norwegian Food Safety Authority have a joint system for food and dietary monitoring that includes a food data- base, dietary calculation system and dietary surveys. Analyses of food with respect to its nutritional content are continuously conducted and the results are published collectively in the national Food Composition Table (www.matvaretabellen.no).