Move to promote healthy food at eateries laudable

THE Ministry of Health initiative to launch healthy menus and food at eating outlets must be lauded. Unhealthy eating as well as overeating is as harmful as smoking as it could lead to all kinds of ailments that will reduce the quality of life and possibly lead to an early grave. Eating food that is not nutritionally balanced can also lead to obesity that carries its own plethora of problems including diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular illnesses.

The Ministry, as part of this initiative, invited the owners and staff of selected restaurants in Sengkurong to a workshop called Sihat Pasti Untong (Healthy is Surely Profitable) at the Health Promotion Centre. The reason for selecting Sengkurong is because of the high concentration of restaurants, including franchise vendors, in the area.

Acting Director-General of General Services Hjh Norsiah Hj Johari expressed concern that there were very few restaurants that provided healthy food alternatives to popular foods. Through the initiative, the Ministry hopes to propagate the National Food Guidelines and to encourage restaurants to come up with healthy food menus.

Hjh Norsiah was happy with the turnout at the workshop and said, that in about three to six months, the restaurants which took part in the workshop would be evaluated and those which succeeded in preparing healthy menus will be entitled to use the "Healthy Menu" logo. The move is to encourage eating outlets to reduce the fat, sugar and salt content in the food and to make them understand that they need not compromise on health to make food tastier.

This is an excellent initiative on the part of the Ministry and should be implemented throughout Brunei. The incentive of being entitled to display the "Healthy Menu" logo should be strong enough to promote healthy food among restaurants. Moreover, it is only proper that the logo be issued only by the Health Ministry and carry security features to ensure that it cannot be easily forged and misused.

The Brunei Government had last year initiated the move to ensure healthy food at school canteens by coming up with a menu for food and drinks categorised using the traffic light system — green for food and drinks that can be sold daily, yellow for that which can only be sold twice a week and red for food and drinks that are forbidden.

However, it was found that since then there were schools that were not monitoring their canteen food and that unhealthy food was creeping back into a number of school canteens. The issue also came to the attention of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam who during the course of presenting keys and land titles to new house owners under the National Housing Scheme dropped in on a primary school in the Belait District which seemed to be providing the children with an unhealthy diet (The Brunei Times, August 10, 2010).

His Majesty's visit should make the authorities improve their monitoring and enforcement of regulations regarding school canteen food. Likewise, the Health Ministry, as it extends the initiative, must similarly monitor eateries to ensure that those which display the logo actually serve healthy food.