W

hat is the best media platform for promoting healthy eating in urban Indonesia nowadays?

I would say Instagram.

Do yoga poses, wear your running shoes, make smoothies, eat greens, take a snapshot, caption it with #healthy #diet #seizethemoment hashtags and upload it onto the site.

This can be the first stage in becoming a health ambassador.

Two influential public figures in Indonesia are currently doing such a thing on their Instagram: former MTV VJ-cum-supermodel Nadya Hutagalung and jazz singer Andien Aisyah.

Indeed, it would be a breakthrough if the government had enough resources and creativity '€” or actually, just some decent negotiation skills '€” to work together with them in a national nutrition or physical activity campaign.

Unlike Nadya, who is focusing on becoming an ambassador for elephant conservation, some companies have led Instagram healthy-lifestyle ambassador Andien in the wrong direction.

She has been assigned by a massive multi-national fast food company in the country to promote the company'€™s fried chicken as '€œdifferent, fresh, cooked properly, and not junk food.'€

What about the fact that each piece of the crispy fried chicken breast contains up to 490 calories, 29 grams of fat, 1140 milligrams of sodium, and 110 mg cholesterol?

Moreover, she will perform in a concert sponsored by a cigarette brand in Surabaya, East Java, later this April. Smoking cigarettes would be the last thing people with health literacy should do.

In addition to social media based health ambassadors, another concern is the ubiquitous marketing of energy drinks, which, ironically, have appointed athletes for promotion.

Children across the country often look up to their favorite athletes.

I remember having a chat with a youngster while taking my grandfather to the hospital for his hemodialysis treatment in Bogor, West Java.

The chubby young man was only 21. He was not accompanying his parents or grandparents: He was receiving the same treatment as my grandpa. The young man was suffering from renal failure for drinking too much energy drinks during his work shifts at a mini-market.

Energy drinks are taken to improve '€œphysical performance.'€ The thing is, they are high in sugar, which is correlated with obesity; they also contain caffeine and taurine '€” an ingredient associated with the occurrence of renal failure when consumed in excess.

Perhaps, Bambang Pamungkas and martial artist-cum-international actor Joe Taslim would think twice about supporting these products if they had only met this young man. Or perhaps, it hadn'€™t occurred to them that they may have been exploited for their inspiring physical fitness and handsomeness to market such products.

Some would argue that they did not promote the drinks to promote excessive consumption. But what is in an advertisement other than the emphasis of a product'€™s benefits?

In this regard, the role played by young celebrities is actually a misfortune, particularly for the public health sector, though most people in the field may not have realized it.

Celebrities create trends and shape the general definition of '€œcoolness'€. These healthy lifestyle '€œambassadors'€ are chosen to depict the outcome of consuming the promoted product. This is how marketing strategy wins.

Mixed messages in public health slow down interventions for positive behavior change. In Andien'€™s case for instance, the worst audience interpretation could be: '€œAndien is healthy, sporty, and sexy. She eats the chicken; she'€™s okay with the cigarette brand. No worries!'€

However, the blame is on no one. Health ambassadors may not be familiar with how things work in the world of public health, and commercial industries are just being clever and market-savvy.

It is the health stakeholders'€™ job to start paying more attention to how the interaction between sports, entertainment and commercial industry may impair the success of their own health intervention programs.

Earlier, in November 2014, the second International Conference on Nutrition led to the Rome Declaration, an international agreement to work together against global nutrition issues.

The declaration states that '€œgovernments should protect consumers, especially children, from inappropriate marketing and publicity of food.'€ It also commits to '€œempower people and create an enabling environment for making informed choices about food products, ['€¦] through improved health and nutrition information and education.'€

Indonesia took part in the assembly, meaning it has promises to keep in comprehensively addressing the issue.

According to the 2014 Global Nutrition Report, Indonesia is experiencing the double burden of undernutrition, where the slow drop in malnutrition is followed by  rapid growth in rates of obesity. According to the Social Security Health Agency website, back in 2012, hemodialysis treatment absorbed as much as 24 percent of the total catastrophic health care in Indonesia '€” and it is an upward trend.

This is just one example among many non-communicable disease treatments in the country. As such, preventive action is crucial to keeping the country from soaring expenditures.

In essence, health stakeholders need to mainstream their efforts, particularly in the world of our young celebrities. Thus, they should spend more time identifying potential human resources from within the sports and entertainment industries to whom the Indonesian public will listen and look up to.

Build networks with them along with their managements. Give perspectives on public health issues and ethics. Make them not only health literate, but also public health literate. And of course, work together with them for teaching the youth about how to be like them, properly.

Apart from all of these wayward health-ambassadors, I am personally a big fan of Andien. She inspires me to do yoga, to go do cardio at the gym, and to read food labels. It may be good to work together with her in a social media-based national health campaign.

But fried chicken commercials may associate such ambassadors with the rising prevalence of obesity, cancer and cardiovascular disease in Indonesia.
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The writer is policy analyst at the Health Ministry'€™s directorate general for nutrition and maternal and child health.