Abstract:

For more than 40 years, social justice has been at the core of Spanish’s national health policy and so, health care services have become essentially free. But now, public sector seems to be unaffordable across Europe and the authorities are overwhelmed by a new challenge:
• On the one hand, citizens have the right to receive high-quality public services,
• On the other hand, the sustainability of the public sector is in doubt.

In this context, The European Commission firmly warns the population that chronic diseases (for instance, cardiovascular diseases, stroke and type-2 diabetes) are responsible for 87% of deaths occurring in Europe. Many of them are preventable just by avoiding smoking or alcohol abuse, discarding junk food and taking half an hour of exercise a day. It is also clear that diet-related diseases and those based on alcohol abuse smoking and lack of activity are the biggest killers in the first world. This is a global problem and those diseases do cost millions of dollars/euros/pounds to develop societies.

All these facts have sparked off an intense debate on self-care. For example, the European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy (EISMD), with the support of the European Union, has launched a macro-survey to find out the opinion of European citizens with regard to chronic diseases, and this is one of the four questions from the survey:"Should health care be provided to everyone for free, despite their choices in life-styles?".

This is a tricky question since it does look like all the responsibility of being healthy is only held on consumers; however, there are other features to take into account:
• First, fast food, which has taken over the whole first world. And the big brands, so powerful all around the world.
• Second, supermarkets and their big related companies. The food that they used to provide was largely fresh and local; now, most of the food is mainly processed and is full of all sorts of additives.
• Third, portion size: this is clearly a massive, massive problem. So is labeling. Consumers strive to get reliable nutritional information from labels but, in most of the cases, this is an impossible mission.
• And lastly, Governments, which are supposed to be the guarantors of population welfare. Unfortunately they don’t behave in such a way on many occasions.

Consequently, there is a bunch of features in which health and education authorities and workers can take action in to reduce the incidence of chronic food-related diseases. Regarding labeling, not only should accurate nutritional information be available for consumers, but some educational interventions also need to be launched. The present work display a research project with the aim of preparing undergraduates in health-related issues (from Grades in Pharmacy and Biomedicine) to study the influence of labeling on the food chosen by the population as well as the reliability of labels according to contrasted health parameters.

Keywords:

Nutrition, Cooperative Group Work, Health Sciences, Teaching Innovation.