It is never too late to start, but the sooner you start, the better. In our present society every day the media influence us very cleverly when making choices. Unfortunately many of those choices generally do not benefit our health. In addition, children – the generation of the future – are very receptive to media messages (responding to feelings of belonging etcetera) which will affect them for the rest of their lives. That is why we should focus on the youth’s awareness of the value of health to eventually create a world with healthy people. With my input and innovative ideas from different perspectives as a board member I hope to shed new light on the mission of the Active Health Foundation.
The common thread in my studies, volunteer work and social internship is that I am always looking for new solutions for social problems in general and how we can all make the change towards a healthy life.
To graduate from my HBO (higher professional) marketing education (cum laude) amongst others I conducted a survey into children’s holiday activities in relation to the value of health. This showed that most activities are just about pleasuring the children without including any health awareness in a subtle way. I have done another research for a large supermarket chain into the repositioning of ready-to-eat soups in the context of the present day healthy food movement.
After obtaining my marketing degree, I wanted to explore further how we can use communication strategies to meet societal challenges. For example, I followed the Masters in Strategic Communication. I completed this course with a master’s thesis on the role of YouTube influencers on the eating behavior of adolescents. By delving into these research currents I wanted to go further. That’s how I started a PhD research on the relationship between food media (all mass media messages about food and food) and food literacy. In this project I investigate how they can effectively use food media to improve the different aspects of food literacy.
Nutrition started as a subject at school when I was sixteen years old. That was a real eye-opener! These lessons made me aware of how important healthy food is and – equally important – that it can be really nice! For me, the subject was so interesting that I started to study it more in my own time, moving from ‘just’ healthy food to intrinsically conscious cooking and shopping. Now I am totally touched by biological food and try to ’seduce’ the people around me by cooking biological food for them and making it so tasty that they will make other choices themselves.[:]
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