Blog
Healthy Heart Expo … Love Your Heart
On February 25, 2023, the Charlotte Alumni Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc held a community service initiative to bring heart health awareness to the Charlotte area. The event was open to the public and included many community platforms such as Mecklenburg Public Health Department, the YMCA, American Heart Association, Atrium Health, and more. The Living FREE Lab’s project manager Dr. Ramine Alexander was personally invited to share her knowledge and work with nutrition and heart health at the event. Accompanied by one of the lab’s project coordinators, Tyisha Harper, they created a heart-healthy display about how everyday food affects our health. This display was interactive for
Understanding the Relationship between Eating Disorders, Religion, and Spirituality
Religion, spirituality, food, and eating behaviors can be important sociocultural factors that are often incorporated to create a person’s social and cultural identity.1 For example, religious observances such as Ramadan, Yom Kippur, and Lent require practitioners to alter their eating behaviors for the duration of the observance.2 Most commonly, practitioners engage in fasting or restrictive food behaviors. Because of their influence on eating behaviors, religion and spirituality have become salient sociocultural factors that can exacerbate disordered eating pathology and behavioral aspects of eating disorders.2 Case studies from Turkey suggest that Ramadan may be an initiating factor for eating disorders in
Food, culture, and tradition: the need for diversity in nutrition recommendations
As of 2020, 80% of dieticians identify as white, 6% as Hispanic or Latino, 3% as Black, and 5% Asian (American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics). This lack of diversity among dieticians has led to the dominance of Eurocentric messaging regarding certain foods and diets, as well as overall health. Nutrition guidelines often do not account for the unique needs of communities of color. This is especially problematic given that racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by certain health conditions, including type II diabetes and obesity (CDC, 2022; Peterson et al., 2019). As dietician services can help prevent
