Healthy Food Distribution
This component of the AHI HPS model aims to support a healthy diet behaviour change. As defined by the World Health Organisation, a healthy diet is one that helps to maintain or improve overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential fluids, macronutrients, micronutrients and adequate calories. A healthy diet is not complicated but expensive. It contains mostly fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and the less processed food and sweet items the best.
AHI provides access to information on the benefits of a healthy diet in the health coaching activity and facilitates diet change by distributing healthy food to families of school children enrolled in the programme. Food distribution is delivered in collaboration with existing approaches, for example as adopted by members of the Global Foodbank Network (see: https://www.foodbanking.org/). The school activities coordinator organises the collection at a food bank and the distribution of food to schools to improve school meals, as well as home diet of school children and the families of the children enrolled in the programme. This component of AHI will not only improve the diet in low-income communities but also reduce food waste and the impact of food waste in the environment. This is an out of school hours activity, therefore headteachers do not need to allocate time to it.