World entering era of global food insecurity with malnutrition & obesity side by side within countries

A good article but it left a big reason why a majority of the poorer households in UK, & around the world, won't have access to healthy & nutritious food. One of the big reasons is social inequality, which in turn, is caused by, in major part, by huge disparity in income & wealth.

There are political & business elites -- the 1-percenters -- who live in their own little world. But the other 99% of the world populations are trying to survive on low income. They don't earn enough to buy healthy & nutritious food in the stores. That majority will always buy the cheap food, which is usually not grown organically & full of calories. Those people know that what they are buying is not healthy for their families but they don't have a choice.

At the same time, the government pays millions in grants & subsidies to companies in military-industrial complex to make new & advanced weaponry, but don't make effective agricultural policies to incentivize scientists & farmers to come up with new & efficient means to grow healthy & nutritious food, all the while limiting the use of fertilizers & harmful chemicals.

At the end of the day, majority of the families know which food is healthy & which one isn't. They would love to buy healthy & nutritious food but are constrained by their income level. If the government wants their public to become healthy, then one major change would be to increase minimum wages & taxes on wealthy individuals. Poor families would readily buy healthy & nutritious food with their increase in income.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-entering-era-of-global-food-insecurity-with-malnutrition-and-obesity-side-by-side-within-10382877.html

The world is entering an era of global food insecurity which is already leading to the “double burden” of both obesity & malnutrition occurring side by side within countries & even within the same families, a leading food expert has warned.

It will become increasingly common to see obese parents in some developing countries raising underweight & stunted children because high-calorie food is cheaper & more readily available than the nutritious food needed for healthy growth, said Alan Dangour of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“We are certainly looking at a period of increased instability in the supply of food, and also the diversity and types of food that are available are going to change,” said Dr Dangour, who is to lead a major study into global food insecurity & its impact on health.

“A result of this is called the ‘double burden’ of malnutrition,” he added. “Under-nutrition causes starvation and stunting in children, whereas obesity and over-weight in adults is another form of malnutrition, caused by eating the wrong type of food.

“The double burden exists in countries, or indeed in households, where you get a stunted child and an overweight mother. And that happens in many countries around the world as a result of the wrong diets being eaten [by adults] and the wrong diets being given to children,” he said.

“It’s not the fault of the mother, it’s the fault of the food system where the mother cannot afford to buy nutritious food such as dairy, eggs and fruit and is predominantly feeding her child a diet that is rich in calories, such as oil and cereal-based carbohydrates,” Dr Dangour said. “That diet will not be sufficient for the child to grow. It will stop the child from being hungry but it will also stop the child from growing properly,” he said.
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“We know that at the end of this century it’s going to be very difficult to grow crops in certain parts of the world because of increasing temperatures,” Dr Dangour said. “In other parts of the world there is going to be increasing productivity because warmer temperatures will mean longer growing seasons.”

He said no single prediction on food insecurity could tell the whole story because climate change will affect different crops differently in different parts of the world: “For the UK, we could imagine a scenario in which changing food availability globally leads to changes in the availability of and the access to that food in the UK.

“For example, cereals may not be affected but fruit and vegetables, critical to a healthy diet, may become much more expensive. As people are responsive to food prices, it may lead to a reduction in consumption of those foods in the poorer population, which may lead to increased health inequality in the UK.”

In the past, policy-makers & planners have concentrated on producing enough food based on calorie content, often to the detriment of more nutritious food, such as pulses & fruit, that are required for healthy growth. This has helped to fuel an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, Dr Dangour explained.

“It’s happened over the past 10 years or so & it’s hugely important. It means policy-making is an enormous challenge, because you think: ‘It’s about just increasing the amount of food we produce.’ Well, no: you need to think about the types of food you are producing and about the access to those foods.

“As food availability globally changes, we could see both of those things happening. We could see under-nutrition and we are already seeing enormous increases in chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes,” he added.

Falling price of processed foods fuelling obesity crisis

There's a misconception that obesity happens because people just like to constantly stuff their faces with junk foods. Not necessarily. Obesity is rising all over the world, & poor people are usually more obese or unhealthy than their rich counterparts; be it in the same country / geographical region or thousands of miles apart.

One big factor is processed foods, which is unhealthy causing obesity, diabetes, cholesterol etc., is much cheaper than healthy, organic alternatives. Dairy, poultry, meat, fruits, & vegetables grown / injected with harmful hormones to grow them quicker are also the same chemicals which interfere with humans' internal hormones & organs, to the point that those people become sick by ingesting those harmful chemicals over time.

Since, the income levels of large section of the populace, around the world, is not increasing, & in many cases, actually decreasing (due to joblessness, homelessness, other factors like medical & education expenses etc.), people are forced to buy unhealthy processed foods / produce, even when they know that it's unhealthy & organic alternatives are healthy.

Although, this article gives a nice alternative to government for helping the public with reducing obesity & other related health problems, by taxing processed foods & using those tax proceeds as subsidies towards the organic foods, it also concedes that taxing junk foods has been a disastrous experiment. Although, Mexico is trying this experiment right now, we don't know how it will fare. I'd add on top of that conclusion that politicians need a very strong will to enact such policies, since, processed foods lobbies are very strong & pay very generously to politicians to support processed foods over organics.

As the article points out that the report's co-author, Steve Wiggins, said that almost 6,000 people prematurely died in UK due to unhealthy foods, my suggestion to resolve this crisis would be stop warfare. One may ask how is warfare linked to stopping obesity crisis?

Considering that US & UK invaded Afghanistan & Iraq, when only 3,000 people died in World Trade Center attacks (which was horrible & I'm not belittling those deaths), & then spent billions upon billions, for a decade, in both wars & then in some infrastructure building, & then all that work amounting to nothing (Taliban are back in Afghanistan & it's again become a poppy-growing haven, Iraq is a mess & that mess has helped the rise of ISIS), what if only a fraction of all that money would've spent, domestically, as subsidies on organics & healthier food alternatives?

The amazing thing is time has not passed, yet. Governments all over the world still have time to reverse climate change & obesity in their populations, by taking money out of military-industrial complexes (which are only fuelling insurgencies & terrorism, instead of killing them) & spend that money on their own people, in terms of improving healthcare access, lowering the costs of healthier foods, reducing the costs of post-secondary education, helping in building of more innovative industries & companies (e.g. green industries), which will in turn provide jobs, helping those companies in raising minimum wages, which will in turn help their own public buy cheaper, but healthier, foods.

Being selfish by spending money on your own population help your own public, & also help the world, when unnecessary wars don't create terrorist groups. Killing multiple birds (terrorism, health crisis, climate change etc.) by one stone. Wow, what a common sense & not-such-a-novel idea.
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http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/11/falling-price-processed-foods-obesity-crisis-tax

The decades-long trend for “unhealthy” foods to get cheaper while fruit & vegetables become more expensive is fuelling the global obesity crisis, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank in London.

It says relative prices for fruit & veg in Brazil, China, Korea & Mexico soared by up to 91% between 1990 & 2012 while prices of some processed foods such as ready meals fell by up to 20% in the same period.

In the UK, the price of an ice cream halved between 1980 & 2012, while that of fresh veg tripled, said the ODI, which suggested that taxes on unhealthy foods matched by subsidies on healthier alternatives could reverse trends resulting in growing proportions of obese & overweight people.

Mexico has imposed taxes on junk food & the ODI said other countries would be closely watching whether this worked.

Its study, covering the four “newly rich” countries as well as the UK & the US, looked at staples such as cereals, root crops & legumes, fruit & veg, “minimally processed” meat, fish & dairy, vegetable oils & fats, animal fats & sugars, & industrially processed foods.

In Mexico, where 7 in 10 adults are overweight or obese, ready meals had become cheaper as the cost of green veg rose, the report says. In Brazil, obesity soared as crisps, biscuits, energy bars & sugary drinks became more widely eaten.

In China, green vegetables became twice as expensive over 2 decades, & in Korea, the price of cabbage, used in many dishes including kimchi, rose by 20%.

Steve Wiggins, one of the report’s co-authors, said: “In Brazil, the consumption of ‘ultra-processed’ ready-to-eat food has risen from 80kg per person per year in 1990 to around 110kg per person per year by 2013. Using the weight of the food as a measure, this is equivalent to each person eating an extra 140 Big Macs a year”, he added.

Wiggins said: “Research in the UK in 2009 predicted that imposing a VAT-style 17.5% tax on less healthy food & using the proceeds to subsidise fruit & vegetables would save between 3,600 & 6,400 premature deaths a year from diet-related disease.

“Even the lower estimate (3,600) is more than twice as many as the amount of people that die on the roads in the UK & a huge effort is put into road safety.”

Previous attempts by countries to introduce taxes on unhealthy foods have proved controversial. Denmark quickly abandoned a 2011 fat tax after a change of government & Conservatives in the UK prefer to rely on voluntary agreements with the food industry to bring about dietary change.

But Wiggins said he did not believe other countries, including in South America, would be deterred by “cultural cringe” or a sense of inferiority to more industrialised states.

Last week, the World Health Organisation & the UK Health Forum told a conference in Prague that almost 75% of men & 67% of women in the UK would be overweight or obese in 15 years time, part of a Europe-wide health crisis that they said could only be averted by decisive action to prevent & tackle obesity by all its governments.

Other research presented to the same conference suggested that any move to introduce taxes on unhealthy foods in the UK & US would not be supported by most people.