 The nutrition unit within the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs recently held a nutrition fair at the PEI Secondary School, aimed at providing students with information about healthy eating, active living and overall wellness. Chief Nutritionist Lisa Hunt stressed on the importance of a healthy eating plan and staying physically active to prevent chronic non-communicable diseases. We are very happy to be here with you because the whole reason we are here is because we want to instill healthy eating habits and we want persons to move more. As you are aware, I'm sure every one of you students have somebody you know with chronic diseases, whether it is diabetes, hypertension, cancer or the other chronic diseases. And why are we having so many persons burdened with this disease is because what we call it lifestyle diseases, they can be prevented. Up to 70% of them can be prevented. So what we eat and our lifestyles will determine our health. Minister for Health, the Honourable Moses Jabatis says he is pleased with this activity and expresses hope that lessons learnt at the fair will be used to change the chronic disease profile in St. Lucia in the future. Exhibitions like this and workshops like this one I am hoping will cause you to realize the state of the kinds of problems we have in St. Lucia. You are not too young to know about this. And it is now you have to make the decisions, the changes in what we eat, how we exercise, how we treat just living and healthy living to protect ourselves in the future. Students of the PI secondary school shared their experiences at the nutrition fair. I felt good that they had a fair in the school because it helps us to know about how to eat properly and how to maintain our body diet. And my feedback from the fair today is I learnt a couple of things. I learnt how much percentage of salt and sugar some snacks contain. Mostly the snacks I eat. So yeah, they taught me how to be aware of that. I felt the fair was very important to us. It was very educational. It told us about the risks out there for when we go later on about what we shouldn't do, what we should do to keep our body healthy and for a better life, long and better life. I think it's important to eat healthy because as a student, we students eat junk food every single day. And today they came to show us a better way of eating. So I think that the fair, it was amazing, really appreciated it. The nutrition fair provided the students with information on nutrition, dental hygiene, substance abuse and stress management to name a few. Reporting from the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, I am Fennel Neptune.