Healthy eat­ing is so much more than look­ing at food, says Anthea Brand, whose work with fam­i­lies in remote com­mu­ni­ties in the NT influ­enced her PhD the­sis topic. 

“We need to talk about a myr­i­ad of oth­er fac­tors that influ­ence what par­ents feed their chil­dren,” says Anthea. 

“Par­ents know their chil­dren should not be eat­ing lol­lies and lots of fruit drinks. Per­haps they had the inten­tion of car­ry­ing that out, but when they went shop­ping with the chil­dren, they’d have a tantrum at the shops. 

“Solu­tions can be, give them a healthy snack before you go shop­ping so they’re not hun­gry, have some­one else do the shop­ping, get some­one to look after them while you do the shop­ping. Dilute the fruit juice.” 

Anthea has worked in rur­al and remote com­mu­ni­ties for more than 20 years, first­ly in far west NSW and west­ern Vic­to­ria, before going to the NT about 10 years ago. 

Work­ing in a health pro­mo­tion and pre­ven­ta­tive health role, Anthea began to see that eat­ing habits and food pref­er­ences real­ly start­ed right from the moment a baby is intro­duced to sol­id food. 

“The first two years are cru­cial, an oppor­tune time to shape what a child prefers in terms of taste and food choic­es, how reg­u­lar­ly they eat and pat­terns of food eat­ing,” she says.

“[Work­ing in fam­i­ly health cen­tres] I could see it was so impor­tant to stim­u­late casu­al con­ver­sa­tions, to step away from your own agen­da… You sit and have a con­ver­sa­tion about their needs, back­ing away from the tra­di­tion­al feel­ing of need­ing to come up with solu­tions to what you see are the issues. It works much better.”

Anthea gave the exam­ple of con­cern around chil­dren chok­ing, which can con­flict with oth­er advice that par­ents should be giv­ing their chil­dren iron-rich foods like meat, which can be one of the trick­i­est foods for young chil­dren to eat. ​“Then that could lead into dis­cus­sions about safe eat­ing envi­ron­ments, rather than chil­dren eat­ing while they’re walk­ing around,” Anthea points out, ​“which can then lead onto oth­er dis­cus­sions such as the gag reflex.

“Then per­haps the dis­cus­sion will go into increas­ing tex­tures of food, as speech is relat­ed to the devel­op­ment of oral motor skills. Talk­ing and eat­ing are con­nect­ed. That poten­tial­ly might lead to a child being tak­en care of by a speech pathol­o­gist or an occu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pist about sen­si­tiv­i­ty to foods, and aver­sions to cer­tain foods.” 

Anthea, who com­plet­ed her PhD in 2020, is now involved in edu­ca­tion and stu­dent place­ments for nurs­es and says this move has giv­en her oppor­tu­ni­ties to be in con­tact with stake­hold­ers who can influ­ence the nec­es­sary changes. Among oth­er roles, she is now a project direc­tor for the Remote Pri­ma­ry Health Care (CARPA) manuals.

“Com­pre­hen­sive pri­ma­ry health care is talked about, is pro­mot­ed – but in many instances it’s not car­ried out,” says Anthea. 

“Don’t bom­bard par­ents with nutri­tion­al knowl­edge. Maybe the issue for them is a fridge that’s not work­ing well, stor­age con­tain­ers that aren’t prop­er­ly sealed against insects.

Maybe the fam­i­ly doesn’t have a decent knife and chop­ping board. That’s why they buy pre­pared food. 

“Per­haps set up a pro­gramme of com­mu­ni­ty cook­ing, a com­mu­ni­ty kitchen area, access to stor­age con­tain­ers. The store may be throw­ing out fan­tas­tic stor­age con­tain­ers that they’d received their bulk food in. 

“Many health pro­fes­sion­als have estab­lished rela­tion­ships with oth­er organ­i­sa­tions in the com­mu­ni­ty – schools, child­care cen­tres, coun­cils,” says Anthea. 

“Think about how those asso­ci­a­tions can be used to improve diet. Iden­ti­fy who you need to be work­ing with across dif­fer­ent lev­els to help cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that sup­ports healthy eating.”