Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley is calling for greater community outreach in communities across small island developing states, to educate citizens about managing their diet and non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
She threw out the challenge to health officials on Tuesday evening while delivering the keynote address to the SIDS Ministerial Conference on NCDs and Mental Health at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Ms. Mottley noted that in the Caribbean, there was heavy consumption of “comfort foods”, coupled with a lack of understanding among the population about the fight against diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
However, she added, the success in tackling these diseases would come when citizens transformed their behaviours and adopted a healthier lifestyle.
“The bottom line is that…we need to speak a different language in order to be successful in the fight. We talk only as medical people talking to each other…. All of those things are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.
“What makes the journey fully realised is when you go outside of this room and into the highways and byways of each of our countries, and start explaining choice and consequence…. The problem is that the information is not always readily available,” The Prime Minister stated.
Ms. Mottley repeated her call for a calorie counter on favourite Caribbean dishes such as “oil down” and “breadfruit cou cou”, which are consumed by Caribbean people.
On the issue of tackling mental health, the Prime Minister said there must be a “holistic approach” to this challenge since “our policy for crime prevention, and our policy for the protection of our people from mental health all link back to each other”.