Public Health in the undergraduate Nutrition programs: Analysis of the educational and political projects and teaching plans

Objective: To analyze the contents of the teaching plans of the disciplines in the areas of Nutrition in Public Health and political and educational plans of nutrition programs in Brazil.Methods: This is a qualitative, exploratory, document-based study that used the technique of the software Alceste(r) in the corpus generated by the analyzed documents.Results:Of the 392 nutrition programs available in 2010 in Brazil, we collected 46 political and educational plans and 517 teaching plans of disciplines in public health. The categories classified and generated for the political and educational plans were: expected competences; actions in nutritional care; and operationalization of the program. The third category corresponded to 75.5% of the content given that much of the content is related to the operationalization of the programs. The categories classified in the second analysis regarding the teaching plans were: nutritional and clinical assessment and diet therapy throughout life; nutritional epidemiology and health surveillance; nutrition education and communication; education for professional practice and culture and social sciences. The first category of this stage corresponded to 34.2% and to one of the axis of the corpus: therefore, the one that composes the disposition of the elements more strongly. This category approached themes little related to the themes treated by the other categories. The other axis of the other classes established a less distant association in the plane between elements, showing that there is some connection between what is exposed and the objectives, contents, and education process that correlate food with the social context and professional practice.Conclusion:The distance between the analyzed contents indicates a dichotomy when describing objectives, competences, and professional practice. The coordination between the biological elements, social practices, and education is inadequate.