About fifty percent of the world’s population suffers from poor nutrition connected to too much or not enough food, a global assessment stated with wide-ranging impacts on health and the world. The Global Nutrition Report , a yearly survey and analysis of the latest data on nutrition and related health issues, came out with that 48 percent of people presently eat either too little or too much. This resulted in them being overweight, obese or underweight.
At present rates, the report finds, the world will fail to meet eight out of nine nutrition targets set by the World Health Organization for 2025. These include reducing child wasting when children are too thin for their height and child stunting when they are too short for their age, and also adult obesity.
The report estimates about 150 million children less than five years old are stunted, more than 45 million are wasted and approximately 40 million are overweight. It also finds more than 40 percent of adults that is about 2.2 billion people are now overweight or obese .Avoidable deaths owing to poor diets have grown by about 15 percent since 2010 and poor diets are now responsible for a quarter of all adult deaths.
World findings depicts that diets have not improved over the last ten years and are now a major menace to people’s health and to the world. This year’s GNR is the first to look at global diets and how food choices are influencing people and the planet. It finds people are failing to consume enough health-promoting foods like fruits and vegetables, mainly in lower-income countries.
Higher-income countries had the highest intake of foods with harmful health impacts like red meat, dairy and sugary drinks. Consumption of harmful foods is on the rise, the report discovered. The red and processed meat is already at almost five times the maximum approval of one serving a week.
The report describes that current global nutrition targets do not mention diet, with the exception of limiting sodium, and new, more whole targets. The report called for immediate funding to improve nutrition across the globe, as Covid-19 has pushed an estimated extra 155 million people into extreme poverty.
The GNR estimates the nutrition spending will need to increase by nearly $4 billion annually until 2030 to meet stunting, wasting, maternal anemia and breastfeeding targets alone. Human diet is a catastrophe for the world Global Disease Burden report describes unhealthy diets constitute up to 11million premature deaths every year. The way humanity produces and eats food must entirely change to avoid millions of deaths and ‘catastrophic’ damage to the world. Presently nearly a billion people are hungry and another two billion are eating very much of the wrong foods, causing epidemics of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
Unhealthy diets constitute up to 11 million avoidable premature deaths every year. At the same time the global food system is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the largest driver of biodiversity loss. New study finds poor diet kills more people globally than tobacco and high blood pressure. Better eating could prevent one in five deaths worldwide.
Low amount of healthy foods, including whole grains and fruits, more significant than high levels of unhealthy foods. Dietary risks, such as high sodium intake, are an ‘equal opportunity killer’. Consuming low amounts of healthy foods, such as whole grains, and too much unhealthy foods, including sweetened beverages, account for one in every five deaths globally.
In 2017, CVD was the leading cause of diet-related deaths (9,497,300) and DALYs (207.2 million), followed by cancers (913,100 deaths and 20.2 million DALYs), diabetes (338,700 deaths and 23.7 million DALYs), and kidney diseases (136,600 deaths and 3.4 million DALYs).
The study finds that while the impact of individual dietary factors varies across countries, three dietary factors – low intake of whole grains, as well as fruits, and high consumption of sodium – accounted for more than 50percent of diet-related deaths and 66percent of DALYs.
The other 50percent of death and 34 percent of DALYs were attributed to high consumption of red meat, processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and trans fatty acids among other foods. The largest gaps between current and optimal diets were observed for nuts and seeds, milk, and whole grains.
Among the world’s 20 most populous countries, Egypt had the highest rate of diet-related deaths (552 per 100,000) and DALYs (11,837 per 100,000) in 2017; Japan had the lowest rate of diet-related deaths (97 per 100,000) and DALYs (2,300 per 100,000).