Not only do 805 million people go to bed hungry every day,
with one-third of global food production (1.3 billion tons each year) being
wasted, there is another scenario that reflects the nutrition paradox even more
starkly: two billion people are affected by micronutrients deficiencies while
500 million individuals suffer from obesity.
The double burden of malnutrition is a situation where
overweight and obesity exist side by side with under-nutrition in the same
country”, according to Anna Lartey, FAO’s Nutrition Director. “And we are
seeing it in lots of the countries that are developing economically.”
“While under-nutrition still kills almost 1.5 million women
and children every year, growing rates of overweight and obesity worldwide are
driving rising diseases like cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes”,
Francesco Branca, Director of Nutrition for Health and Development at the World
Health Organisation (WHO), explained
Flavio Valente, who represented civil society organisations
at the Second International Conference on Nutrition remarked that “the current
hegemonic food system and agro-industrial production model are not only unable
to respond to the existing malnutrition problems but have contributed to the
creation of different forms of malnutrition and the decrease of the diversity
and quality of our diets.”
This position was shared by many speakers, who stressed the
negative impact that advertising of unhealthy food has, mainly on children. According
to a participant from Chile, calling obesity a non-communicable disease is
misleading, because it spreads through the media system very effectively. Chile,
a country where 60 percent of people suffer from over-nutrition and one obese
person dies every hour, currently risks
being brought before the World Trade Organisation by multinational food
companies for its commitment to protect public health by regulating the
advertising of certain food.
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