Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Malnutrition and Obesity

One in nine people is hungry, or 820 million people worldwide.
One in three is overweight or obese.

Malnutrition leading cause of death and ill health worldwide. The Global Nutrition Report 2020 found that most people across the world cannot access or afford healthy food, due to agricultural systems that favour calories over nutrition as well as the ubiquity and low cost of highly processed foods. Inequalities exist across and within countries, it says.

Venkatesh Mannar, a special adviser on nutrition to the Tata Trusts and the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition, said: “Poor diet and malnutrition is not a matter of personal choice. Most people are not able to do this because of inequality of food systems. They not have access to a range of healthy food. The interface between the food supply chain and consumers is inequitable.”

Cynthia Rosenzweig, a climate expert at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the author of the food security chapter in the IPCC’s report on land and climate change, highlighted the inequality in food prices across the world, where the cost of an egg in Burkina Faso is 15 times more in comparison with grain and rice, compared with just twice the cost of such staples in the US.
An increasing number of countries have the “double burden” of malnutrition, obesity and other diet-related diseases such as diabetes.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/12/malnutrition-leading-cause-of-death-and-ill-health-worldwide-report

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