Assessment

Journals: Current Nutrition Topics

Topic 1: Food-based dietary guidelines

Topic 2: Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) Tax

Format: Each journal entry should be succinct and strictly no more than 1000 words.

Task description: Debates occur in nutrition each week that potentially influences health policy and we need to think about them. The Journal Entries will give you an opportunity to critically engage with current debates in the field of nutrition. It is easy to say you agree or disagree with something, but harder to say why; your argument needs to be backed up with evidence. So to give you the opportunity to engage with current debates, you will be given two topics over the course of the semester (see table below), for which you will need to construct an evidence-based journal entry or response.

1. Strengths and limitations of the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating when compared with a Food-based dietary guideline of a country of your choice - justify your response clearly.

2. Is a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages likely to address obesity? Justify your response.

Your response should be evidence based, as well as include your own critical perspective of the issue discussed. Entries should directly address the topic. Please take care to use appropriate academic language, be grammatically correct, and reference correctly. Please engage with various resources, and draw on credible references to support your journal entry responses. References are not included in the word count.