2.C. Workshop: Our Food, Our Health, Our Earth: the health literacy pillar of health promotion for sustainability
Authors:   Organised by: EUPHA-HP, Escola Superior de Saúde da Universidade dos Açores (Portugal), Institute of Sociology, University of Education (Germany), CrAdLiSa,   Chair persons: Luís Saboga-Nunes (EUPHA-HP), Uwe H Bittlingmayer (Germany)
Published: October 2023

Health Literacy (HL) is one of the three pillars of Health Promotion (along with Good Governance and Healthy Cities) (The Shanghai Declaration, WHO 2016). In the dilemma of a sustainable future for humanity, there is a cross-section meeting point where fundamental issues activate the ingredients that either jeopardize that future or respond to the foundations of sustainability. These ingredients are the Food chain (preferences, choices, production, distribution and consumption), the Health dimension (perceptions, concepts, theoretical implications to whole system & society approaches and activation of strategies to promote health) and the Planet (where limited resources do not mitigate humanity hunger of their appropriation, transformation and use). Therefore at the public health level, it is crucial to deepen the discussion, research the best options, facilitate the correct decisions, empower the way forward while we envision a global response that will move humanity to respond positively to the foundations of sustainability. A component that might impinge either of these two options, above referred, is the level of HL that citizens, communities, societies as a whole, possess and integrate in their everyday decision & action processes. This workshop aims to establish a ground approach to the articulation between health promotion and HL when sustainability is at stake. Therefore, it discusses how this third pillar (i.e. HL) may be translated into the everyday practice of Health Promotion “ensuring that people can cope with the challenges they face, through health literacy, ...to lead lives ...in harmony with Nature” (WHO 2021). In the first presentation HL is explored as a situational social practice. In the second presentation, a closer look to “Our Food” is made by the means of a research that investigated 852 adolescents’ health literacy. In the third presentation the conceptualization of Health and HL are considered. The forth presentation will lead the audience to the theoretical discussion of Health Promotion and Positivism. This discussion triggers the floor to a debate around seminal ideas and action processes in the realm of Health Promotion in the context of best practices. From the public health perspective the aim of this workshop is to share with the audience an opportunity to immerse in two different social contexts and explore their HL practices as tracer approaches. This workshop offers a forum for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers interested in health promotion pillars (e.g., health literacy), facilitate the dialogue and lively interaction and vivid discussions to improve policy research, practice, and policy-making, support further synergies, facilitate networking and collaboration, and support international capacity building towards sustainability.

Key messages

• Explore concepts (e.g. on health literacy) and theories to ensure that a coherent takeover is aiming at sustainable health promotion implementation strategies.

• The third pillar of Health Promotion (i.e. health literacy) demands a broader reflection of theoretical versus practice approaches when looking at our Food, our Health & our Planet.