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Healthier Choices
To enable people to make healthier choices. The number of obese people and children is increasing. People in lower socio-economic groups, particularly women, are more likely to be obese. The four most common health problems linked to obesity are heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and osteoarthritis. The target on obesity has been developed, as it will require action on a cross Departmental basis on two main fronts: physical activity and food and nutrition. Dental decay is a common, painful and costly disease to the individual and society and is directly related to frequent consumption of sugar and products containing sugar. Improvement in the diet, particularly of children, will also lead to a reduction in dental decay. As smoking is the greatest singly cause of avoidable illness and preventable death, targets need to be set to reduce the levels of smoking here. This will be addressed in the development of the Tobacco Action Plan. How people live their lives is central to improving the long term state of our health. What we eat, how active we are, whether we smoke tobacco or habitually use other addictive drugs, how often we drink alcohol and how much, whether we engage in other types of risk-taking behaviour – all these have an affect on health. Accurate and relevant health information is essential if individuals are to effect improvements in their health by adopting healthier lifestyles. However, there are differences in people’s ability to act on health information to change their behaviour and reduce risks to their health. Help must be readily available for those who want to make healthier choices but for a variety of reasons find it hard to do so. Self-confidence, hope, peer influences, income level and family and social networks all have an important role in supporting people to lead healthier lives. Healthy public policies should help make healthy choices the easy choices. There are 11 action areas in this objective: 1. Smoking 2. Physical Activity 3. Food and Nutrition 4. Breastfeeding 5. Folic Acid 6. Alcohol 7. Drug Misuse 8. Drug and alcohol joint implementation model 9. Sexual health 10. Oral Health 11. Health education DHSSPS has produced or will produce strategy papers setting objectives for each of the following areas: ¨ Smoking
¨ Physical activity
¨ Food and nutrition
¨ Alcohol abuse
¨ Drugs misuse
¨ Sexual health
¨ Oral health Locations
- All Eastern Area
- Ards
- Down
- East Belfast
- Lisburn
- North Belfast
- North Down
- Regional
- South Belfast
- West Belfast
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Healthier Choices discussion Calendar
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