75 percent of food products in supermarkets and fast food outlets contain corn, soy or wheat. The introduction of high-fructose corn syrup, first widely used in 1980, as a new outlet for corn has led to a dramatic increase in soda consumption and to a whole range of cheap, sugary foods. Chicken McNuggets, introduced in 1980, were a harbinger of the increase in cheap meat, for which 80 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used as animal feed.
The abundance of cheap food with low nutritional value in the Western diet has wreaked havoc on our health; in America, one third of children and two thirds of adults are overweight or obese and are more likely to develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
1.6 billion people on the planet are overweight. That's a threefold increase since 1980, according to WHO, with projections of 2.3 billion adults overweight by 2015.
But another one billion people on the planet are still hungry.
Obesity and hunger look like two sides of the same core problem: malnutrition because of a lack of access to nutritious foods.
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