HOME COOKING: Health Empowerment Strategy in People With Type II Diabetes Mellitus

One of the main factors influencing health is nutrition. Therefore, lifestyle and more specifically healthy eating habits, are key elements for the promotion of healthy lifestyle in society. Eating habits are defined as the more or less conscious, collective and repetitive behaviour that leads people to select, consume and use a certain foods or diet, in response to social and/or cultural influences. The acquisition of eating habits occurs since childhood. For this reason, an education in food and gastronomy is necessary to promote healthy eating habits in society. Education programmes so far have focused on nutrition education, i.e. on transferring theoretical knowledge about nutrition. However, currently, it is known that traditional knowledge about nutrition is not sufficient and it is necessary to go deeper into the factors that determine what people eat, and how people eat.

The studies related to the sensory perception of food and the relationship that this perception has with the choice of food, seek to decipher the keys that make different individuals to have certain eating habits based on: personal tastes, the influence of culture, the emotions that make them feel, learning, and so on. Nutritional recommendations will always be simpler to follow when, implicit in them, the tastes and food choices of each individual are found.

From a holistic perspective, individuals should be considered as a human being within a social, cultural and technological environment. In this sense, gastronomy is defined as "the reasoned knowledge of what people eat and how people eat. It is an interdisciplinary area of knowledge that studies and generates physical-chemical, cultural and socioeconomic processes where human beings cultivate, process, distribute and consume good foods and beverages that affect their physical, mental and social well-being". Gastronomy is a vehicle capable of creating social trends and the convergence of this discipline together with nutritional education can be a more effective tool to disseminate messages about what is considered a healthy diet, how to eat a healthy diet, as well as to transfer cooking skills that allow the population to acquire and sustain these eating habits at home.

Briefly, gastronomy plays a fundamental role in covering the nutritional needs of the general population, and at the same time, it satisfies their expectations of flavour. Therefore, gastronomy is considered a decisive channel to favour education of taste, a better nutrition and, in general, for health promotion.

The effect of nutrition on health is not homogeneous in the population. On the one hand, factors such as the type of food and the culinary techniques used have an influence. On the other hand, individual characteristics such as lifestyle, genetic background and wellbeing must be taken into account. In this context, Personalized and Precision Gastronomy based on individuals' eating habits, genetic profile, intestinal microbiota profile, metabolome, epigenome, tastes and preferences, and so on, in order to develop strategies that favour a healthy and tailor-made diets for each individual.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is one of the most prevalent metabolic diseases worldwide. In the Basque Country, it is estimated that the disease affects 10% of the population. People with diabetes have a high risk of suffering complications related to this illness. In addition, people with T2DM are more prone to develop other diseases such as cardiovascular diseases as well as premature mortality. For this reason, it is necessary to prevent the disease and to try to reduce the risk of developing complications in people who have already been diagnosed with T2DM.

The current increase in DMT2 is associated with an increase in obesity. This multifactorial disease, in turn, has been related to unhealthy lifestyles. Moreover, apart from physical activity, following a healthy diet is a determining factor. Although there is increasing information on nutrition, the desired effect on the prevention of this disease is not being achieved. This may in part be due to a lack of skills to continue a healthy diet.

Attention should also being paid to individual factors that may influence in specific nutritional needs of T2DM. In this sense, personalised gastronomy can facilitate the empowerment of people with diabetes providing them with culinary techniques and skills that allow patients to follow a healthy diet adapted to the conditions of this disease and to personal needs and preferences.

In this context, the HOME COOKING project seeks to carry out a one-month culinary intervention programme with people diagnosed with T2DM, in order to analyse the health effects that the programme can produce, comparing it with the results obtained with a traditional intervention solely based on the training of theoretical recommendations about nutrition.

In conclusion, the main hypothesis of this project lies in the fact that one of the barriers for the population to acquire and maintain healthy eating habits is related, in part, to the fact that they do not have enough culinary skills (food preparation) and do not have sufficient knowledge about nutrition (knowledge about the product). Thus, bearing in mind that several studies have demonstrated the relationship between the trust (empowerment) that provides to have food preparation skills (culinary skills), and knowledge about the quality of the diet in terms of health, the present project suggests that beneficial effects on health can be obtained when nutritionists and public health professionals promote culinary intervention programmes aimed at providing theoretical and practical knowledge.

Therefore, this project is novel since it proposes a paradigm shift promoting the incorporation of culinary training as a complement to nutritional education. Likewise, the project is based on the Mediterranean diet, a diet pattern whose health benefits have been scientifically endorsed. The study is a reference project in this field and its results will be of great relevance to public health.