Nourishing the SDGs: Global Nutrition Report 2017

A better nourished world is a better world. Yet despite the significant steps the world has taken towards improving nutrition and associated health burdens over recent decades, this year’s Global Nutrition Report shows what a large-scale and universal problem nutrition is. The global community is grappling with multiple burdens of malnutrition. Our analysis shows that 88% of countries for which we have data face a serious burden of either two or three forms of malnutrition (childhood stunting, anaemia in women of reproductive age and/or overweight in adult women)

You say you want a data revolution? Taking on food systems accountability

Dramatic improvements in data availability and quality are needed to meet the challenge of monitoring and analyzing food systems, so that appropriate policies and actions to improve human and planetary health can be identified and data-informed accountability mechanisms put in place to strengthen food systems governance. Studying food systems is complex due to diverse actors and interlinking processes that operate on multiple spatial and temporal scales, and their multiple outcomes, which may be subject to hidden feedback mechanisms and tradeoffs. However, descriptive research to characterize food system components and make comparisons across geography, income groups, and population groups is an important foundation. The first part of this article details a series of critical data gaps and limitations that are currently hindering food systems learning and accountability, also comparing these gaps across regions and income groups. The second part of the article introduces the Food Systems Dashboard, a new data visualization tool that aims to improve access to and usage of food systems-related data, thus strengthening the data value chain and better informing policies and actions intended to improve diets, nutrition, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability.1

The importance of food systems and the environment for nutrition.

Global and local food system transformation is necessary in order to ensure the delivery of healthy, safe, and nutritious foods in both sustainable and equitable ways. Food systems are complex entities that affect diets, human health, and a range of other outcomes including economic growth, natural resource and environmental resiliency, and sociocultural factors. However, food systems contribute to and are vulnerable to ongoing climate and environmental changes that threaten their sustainability. Although there has been increased focus on this topic in recent years, many gaps in our knowledge persist on the relation between environmental factors, food systems, and nutritional outcomes. In this article, we summarize this emerging field and describe what innovative nutrition research is needed in order to bring about food policy changes in the era of climate disruption and environmental degradation

Searching for the essential: Exploring practitioners’ views on actions for re-orienting food systems towards healthy diets

To effectively accelerate action from policymakers on re-orienting food systems towards healthy diets, global stakeholders need to first determine which of the many actions under discussion are essential to delivering healthy diets. In this exploratory study, we sought to identify if there are any actions that are considered essential for re-orienting food systems towards healthy diets across a diverse range of stakeholders and sectoral and country contexts. Through engaging practitioners in scoring and ranking actions, we found a wide diversity of views across many of the proposed actions. However, a handful of actions emerged as more essential, particularly school food programmes

42 policies and actions to orient food systems towards healthier diets for all

In January 2020, the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and Johns Hopkins University began compiling recommendations made by major international reports on how to orient food systems for nutrition. This was the first step towards our ultimate goal of identifying a group of actions essential in every context to lay the foundations of a nutritious food system – the policies and programmes which any policymaker serious about improving diets and nutrition would enact at a minimum. The context was the increasing number of international processes designed to provide guidance on food systems for nutrition, including the ongoing development of the Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). As part of this process, a long-list of 42 policies and actions with the potential to orient the food system towards healthy diets was generated. Aligned with the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) report Food Systems and Nutrition, the list is made up of actions with the potential to effect change through food supply chains, food environments and consumers. Actions to change principles, governance and political processes, although critically important to frame and enable the delivery of these actions, were not the focus of the project. While the actions are focused on healthy diets, the next phase will assess how they can synergise with and support efforts to advance environmental sustainability

Metrics of sustainable diets and food systems

Policy makers and consumers are challenging the scientific community to come up with ways to measure the environmental impact of the foods we eat. This Brief describes a challenging and innovative research agenda implemented by Bioversity and its partners to describe and measure sustainable diets and food systems. The Brief builds on the early work of FAO and Bioversity in understanding sustainable diets and identifies the rich cultural history of our food and the very real concerns about access and cost is not lost in our mission to improve dietary quality for the poor with the ultimate goal of improving nutrition and health. The study of sustainable diets is as relevant to the challenges of undernutrition as it is with dietary transition and nutrition related chronic diseases and obesity

Healthy, affordable and climate-friendly diets in India

India has among the highest lost years of life from micronutrient deficiencies. We investigate what dietary shifts would eliminate protein, iron, zinc and Vitamin A deficiencies within households’ food budgets and whether these shifts would be compatible with mitigating climate change. This analysis uses the National Sample Survey (2011–12) of consumption expenditure to calculate calorie, protein and the above micronutrient intake deficiencies and relate them to diets, income and location. We show that more than two-thirds of Indians consume insufficient micronutrients, particularly iron and Vitamin A, and to a lesser extent zinc. A greater proportion of urban households than rural households are deficient at all income levels and for all nutrients, with few exceptions. Deficiencies reduce with increasing income. Using constrained optimization, we find that households could overcome these nutrient deficiencies within their food budgets by diversifying their diets, particularly towards coarse cereals, pulses, and leafy vegetables, and away from rice. These dietary changes could reduce India’s agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 25%. Current agricultural and food pricing policies may disincentivize these dietary shifts, particularly among the poor

Ecological Approaches to Human Nutrition

Objective. To describe the role that ecological knowledge plays in alleviating hidden hunger, considering human nutrition as an overlooked ecosystem service. Methods. We review existing literature and propose a framework that expands on earlier work on econutrition. We provide novel evidence from case studies conducted by the authors in western Kenya and propose a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration to alleviate hidden hunger, increase agricultural productivity, and improve environmental sustainability. Results. Our review supports the concept that an integrated approach will impact human nutrition. We provide evidence that increased functional agrobiodiversity can alleviate anemia, and interventions that contribute to environmental sustainability can have both direct and indirect effects on human health and nutritional well-being. Conclusions. Integrated and interdisciplinary approaches are critical to reaching development goals. Ecologists must begin to consider not only how their fiel

2018 Global Nutrition Report

The 2018 Global Nutrition Report shares insights into the current state of global nutrition, highlighting the unacceptably high burden of malnutrition in the world. It identifies areas where progress has been made in recent years but argues that it is too slow and too inconsistent. It puts forward five critical steps that are needed to speed up progress to end malnutrition in all its forms and argues that, if we act now, it is not too late to achieve this goal. In fact, we have an unprecedented opportunity to do so