Health Sciences

This course provides students with an understanding of the wider social and environmental determinants of health and how the determinants impact health attitudes, behaviors, and health outcomes. This also addresses strategies and interventions at the individual, community, national, and global levels.

This course provides students an understanding of physical and mental health conditions. It explores the relationships between physiology, physical health, lifestyle factors, and mental health and wellbeing. 

This course examines the multidisciplinary nature of the study of food and nutrition. The course covers a basic understanding of food production, processing and storage from the farmer's field to the dinner table. Topics include food safety, food selection behavior as well as balanced nutrition as part of life style instrumental to good health. Basic macro- and micronutrients from these food and its absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion allow students to understand the function of these nutrients in the human body. The course also includes food composition and functional properties of major nutrients, food additives, food hygiene, safety and regulation, food security, healthy eating-concepts and practice, essential nutrients, diet and disease relationship.

This intermediate level course explores new health paradigms so future health professionals make decisions that transcend health systems and the societies they interact with. The course covers the following topics:

• Health and its history and types of medicine
• Biopsychosocial Model
• New tendencies in health designs
• Future of health designs

Health communication is becoming increasingly important in a world faced with new health challenges from obesity to Ebola, anxiety to diabetes. This course considers the role of language in our experience of and beliefs about health and illness. Students learn how health communication differs among various communities, both monolingual and multilingual, from the grassroots level, such as in families, to broader groups, for example, between health professionals and patients. It also considers the effects of social diversity, such as the age, gender, and ethnicity of patients and healthcare professionals. Students become proficient in analyzing a range of relevant uses of language, including narratives about health and illness, the representation of health and illness in the media, computer-mediated communication about illness, and public health information, persuasion and campaigns.

The course provides students with an understanding of the pharmacological actions of a selection of the main classes of drugs in current therapeutic use. Lectures provide insight into the use of drugs in the treatment of a variety of human diseases ranging from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, through to inflammation, allergy, and pain. The drug treatment of the diseases is considered against the backdrop of the underlying disease processes, focusing primarily on the mechanisms by which the drugs bring about therapeutic relief. 

This course explores the concept of physical activity and the importance of encouraging people to move more and sit less as part of health promotion efforts. Students examine measuring movement behaviors to equip students with the ability to judge data based on how it was obtained. Students identify and analyze various factors that impact how much or little people move. This includes looking into the psychology of physical activity, environmental assessments, and policy enquiries. Insights allow students to design an intervention that can improve movement behaviors. Students can gain tangible knowledge and skills for assessing, understanding, and changing movement behaviors across diverse populations.

The course familiarizes students with epidemiological methods to develop and test hypotheses pertaining to physical activity and health and disease outcomes at the population level. It also develops skills in designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions for improving physical activity at the population level, and provides an opportunity for in-depth analysis, critical thinking, and discussion on how epidemiological methods are used in studying physical activity behavior.

This course provides students with a solid understanding of the key aspects in energy metabolism, and the effects of nutrients on (muscle) metabolism during exercise of different types. The course requires prior knowledge on some basic biochemical concepts (e.g. the structure and function of macromolecules, common forms of chemical reactions, basic cell structure, and metabolism of macromolecules). The course builds around a practical case study. With a group of students, develop a cohesive and evidence-based recommendation regarding nutrition and exercise for a client sports team. The first part of the course provides a theoretical foundation on the basics of exercise physiology and biochemistry. In the form of tutorial groups, discuss the physiology of muscles, the metabolism of macronutrients, the hormonal regulation of metabolism, the biochemical and physiological role of macro- and micronutrients in relation to exercise and fatigue, and adaptations of the body to endurance, and resistance training. You are expected to conduct a further search of the literature, as the theoretical foundation covers only part of the concepts important for developing a cohesive recommendation regarding nutrition and exercise. Prerequisite SCI2035 Biochemistry. Recommended SCI2009 Human Physiology and/or, SCI2037 Cell Biology.

This course teaches the psychological processes that inform eating behavior, and the challenges in changing these behaviors. Receive a recent model to explain how many people can display eating behaviors that run counter to their intentions. This model is used to connect biological, sensory, consumer-level, and psychological processes to understand eating behavior. This course focuses in depth on the different psychological processes that explain differences in people’s eating behavior with a strong emphasis on automatic processes that steer behavior in the moment of food choice and eating, and how these contribute to current difficulties to behavior change. The course. focuses on the question of how people’s eating behavior can be changed by employing psychological insights and interventions, and how to deal with psychological resistance to change. Learn how these psychological insights can be applied and integrated in two distinct approaches to behavior change: ‘Nudging’ and ‘Boosting’. Learn to design strategies to change behavior and reflect on the applied and ethical implications of the two different approaches by literature self-studies, quiz learnings, and groupwork assignments. Basic knowledge of biology, psychology, nutrition and/or health sciences required. This course is part of the minor Psychobiology of Eating Behavior.