A centralidade da alimentação no desenvolvimento sustentável: como estamos formando nutricionistas diante deste desafio?

Abstract

The environmental crises caused by climate change and the finite nature of natural resources express the planetary limits that have been exceeded in recent decades. Thinking about Sustainable Development currently requires paying attention to its multidimensional complexity and in this sense, the environmental and health/nutrition dimensions are at the heart of these discussions. Food has been one of the central axes, as we face growing epidemics of malnutrition, obesity and climate change. These epidemics have been jointly named the Global Syndemic. In this sense, one of the important actors in these changes is the University and the training that has been proposed to one of the main professionals in this fight – the nutritionist. The objective of this work is to analyze how Nutrition Courses at Federal Universities are designed with regard to training on food and sustainability for their students, considering their approaches, knowledge bases, construction of skills, gaps and challenges. The research resulted in two articles: the first article analyzed the PPCs of the 42 nutrition courses based on keywords, seeking to verify updates to the Course Pedagogical Projects (PPCs), the existence of mandatory and optional curricular components (CCR) and syllabi related to the theme, check if there are mentions of this theme in the epistemological and methodological references and if there is data on teacher training in this sense, and find out how the course enables the construction of skills for the performance of these professionals, identifying what they describe about the profile of the egress. Only a third of IFES consider sustainability in nutritionist training. This number improves when analyzing the guiding references and presence of subjects in the curriculum, but it is not always addressed as a priority. Added to this is the small number of teachers with training on the subject. This demonstrates its marginalization, but with growing concern seen in the most current PPCs, showing the need to reformulate the epistemological bases of Nutrition Science. The second article analyzed, through interviews with the coordinators of the five universities most adherent to the theme of sustainability, how the configuration and organization of PPCs and the vision that the interviewees have on the subject shape the skills necessary to work with environmental sustainability, in addition to to analyze the environmentalization of these curricula, based on research, extension and teacher training. It was observed that the theme is inserted in different ways within the curricula, especially linked to the areas of Collective Food and Social Nutrition, but the subject is still not as clear as to its definition, which can make it difficult to build skills. It was also observed that there are research and extension actions related to the theme and that their inclusion can contribute to curricular environmentalization, but teacher training seems to be disadvantaged in terms of sustainability. The main conclusions of this work are related to the need to define a solid body of knowledge based on the reformulation of the guidelines for including the topic in PPCs and greater training for teachers, so that they can assist in building skills for future professional nutritionists to act towards sustainability.