Culturally relevant food and lifestyle interventions lead to sustainable health. Definition of health in public domain needs to move beyond the reductionist view of looking at food groups-calories narrative; it needs to be looked at from a much broader perspective of food systems, a multi-disciplinary approach that links individual health to local economy and global ecology. The food systems view also accounts for climate, crop cycle, agricultural practices, cooking traditions, and food heritage of each region. A public health project was conducted from Jan to March 2018 with a follow up in December 2018. In this project, cumulative weekly guidelines were given to participants for 12 weeks. More than 125,000 registered participants from more than 40 countries across the globe participated in the project. The participants self-rated their score on a liner scale of 1 to 5 on six metabolic health parameters: energy levels during the day, sleep quality in the night, sweet cravings post meals, acidity/bloating/indigestion, exercise compliance, and PMS/period pain (for women participants only). These parameters were then tracked throughout the 12 weeks. In addition, the participants also tracked inch-loss from waist at the navel. The 12 weekly guidelines covered the following categories: food and eating practices-related, physical activity and exercise-related and lifestyle and habits-related.Incorporating the guidelines led to a significant improvement in metabolic health parameters (40 to 65 percent on average) over the period of 12 weeks and also led to inches lost from the waist (more than 80 percent of participants lost at least an inch). The easy and accessible nature of the guidelines also ensured that even after one full year, most of the participants (more than 90 percent) continue to inculcate them in their daily lives. Public health messages therefore should focus on advocating local, culturally compliant and traditional foods and eating practices along with increase in physical activity and exercise and improvement in daily habits like gadget and plastic use.

Conflict of interest:
There is no conflict of interest

P1-33-06 - A food system approach to improving public health