“Every Bite Counts” was a timely initiative focused on educating the society on the necessity of a healthy diet and helping improve a healthier lifestyle in order to prevent Non-Communicable Diseases which are highly responsible for most of the deaths in Sri Lanka. It was carried out under two categories:

 We initiated a new trend to serve healthy food replacing the fast food which we used to serve at District Council Meetings as refreshments, in order to promote healthy food among our fellow Rotaractors. This was implemented at the following meetings.

o 14th of October 2018 – District Council Meeting for October (during the official district visit to Kandy)

o 05th of January 2019 – District Council Meeting for January

o 26th of January 2019 – Special District Council Meeting

 Awareness sessions on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) and the importance of having a healthy diet were conducted to school children as it is more effective to educate them at their childhood. This awareness programs also included some medical checkups for the students such as BMI checkups. Two sessions were held as follows:

o 27th of November 2018 – Session for the students of President’s College, Kotte at school premises

o 07th of December 2018 – Session for the students of Oxford College, Badulla at Uva- Wellassa University

The objective of this cluster initiative is to create a healthy lifestyle for individuals by enhancing them on the details of dietary patterns of the modern society and the adverse effects of fast food consumption, high energy dense food and daily sugar intake and this was done by having workshops for school students. By doing so we were able to achieve our other objective of uplifting quality education, as it tends to be more effective due to the practical approach rather than traditional methods of awareness. Moreover, this initiative was intended as a long-term goal of having better health condition to support performance in academic and extracurricular activities for the students who are the future of this country.

As mentioned above the SDG focuses Good health and well-being and Quality education were versioned in the project objectives by having the medical checkups to monitor the progress and impact of the project and creating healthy awareness of lifestyle and food consumption in the most effective manner.