318 research outputs found
Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?
How can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to improve food systems before our planet loses its ability to sustain itself and its people?Do we have the right to eat wrongly?As the world's agricultural, environmental, and nutritional needs intersectâand often collideâhow can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to reverse the damage by changing how we make, distribute, and purchase food? Can such changes in practice and policy reverse the trajectories of the biggest global crises impacting our world: the burden of chronic diseases, the consequences of climate change, and the systemic economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations?Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? is a clarion call for both individual consumers and those who shape our planet's food and environmental policies that:⢠describes the often destructive path that foods take from farms and seas through their processing, distribution, marketing, purchasing and waste management sites⢠explores the complex web of factors impacting our ability to simultaneously meet nutritional needs, sustain biodiversity and protect the environment⢠raises readers' food and environmental literacy through an engaging narrative about Fanzo's research on five continents along with the work of other inspiring global experts who are providing solutions to these crises⢠empowers readers to contribute to immediate and long-term changes by informing their decisions in restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets, and kitchen
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Agricultural Biodiversity and Nutrition
More than 900,000,000 people are hungry every day. One in three people suffers from illnesses related to malnutrition and lack of essential nutrients, with the majority being women and children. While vitamin A and zinc deficiency together contribute to more than 500,000 child mortalities each year, at the same time diseases previously associated with affluence, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease, are growing most rapidly in low- and middle-income countries
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Africa human development report 2012: towards a food secure future
The 2012 Human Development Report for Africa explores why dehumanizing hunger remains pervasive in the region, despite abundant agricultural resources, a favorable growing climate, and rapid economic growth rates. It also emphasizes that food security â the ability to consistently acquire enough calories and nutrients for a healthy and productive life - is essential for human development.
To boost food security, it argues for action in four interrelated areas: agricultural productivity, nutrition, access to food, and empowerment of the rural poor. It asserts that increasing agricultural productivity in sustainable ways can bolster food production and economic opportunities, thereby improving food availability and increasing purchasing power. Effective nutrition policies can create conditions for the proper use and absorption of calories and nutrients. Finally, empowering the rural poor - especially women - and harnessing the power of information, innovation, and markets can promote equitable allocation of food and resources within families and across communities
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Decisive Decisions on Production Compared with Market Strategies to Improve Diets in Rural Africa
Agriculture plays a central role in rural households, where 75% of the world's poor reside and where there is substantial undernutrition consisting of both macro- and micronutrient deficiencies. Of the 2.5 billion people in poor countries whose livelihoods depend directly on the agriculture sector, 1.5 billion people live in subsistence, smallholder households (working on â¤10 hectares of land). In sub-Saharan Africa, 80% of the food supply for the continent is provided by smallholder farmers, many of whom are women.
It is clear that agriculture is the sector best placed to improve food production and access to and consumption of more nutritious foods, and agriculture-led growth has, in some cases, led to observed declines in undernutrition. However, most agriculture policies have focused on improving the yield of key staple cereal crops, mainly rice, wheat, and maize, which at the same time has made global food supplies more homogenous. This lack of diversity poses public health challenges. Dietary diversity is a vital element of diet qualityâthe consumption of a variety of foods across and within food groups, and across different varieties of specific foodsâand has shown demonstrable gains toward Adequate Intake of essential nutrients and important nonnutrient factors. Although agriculture can make contributions to healthy diets by increasing and improving diversity of landscapes and the availability of foods produced from those lands, more empirical evidence is needed to better understand the links between agriculture and dietary outcomes
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The role of farming and rural development as central to our diets
Farming and rural development are central to the diversity of global food systems and diets, both signiďŹcant factors in determining the nutrition and health outcomes of the world's population. Diets are not static and indeed are changing due to globalization, urbanization and demographic shifts. In addition, multiple burdens of malnutrition (both undernutrition and overweight and obesity) are not improving fast enough and in some cases, reversing for the worse. Unhealthy diets are major contributors to these burdens. Rural people and particularly smallholder farmers, are critical in delivering the key nutrients in the global food supply that make up our diets for human health. However, rural populations in some parts of the world are often poor, and suďŹer burdens of malnutrition on both ends of the spectrum â undernourished or overweight. They are also faced with signiďŹcant challenges, often due to poor investment towards rural development. Challenges include natural resource declines, climate change risk, women disempowerment, conďŹict, and urbanization; which wreak havoc on these populations. If actions are not taken and their livelihoods are not prioritized, it will be a challenge to achieve sustainable development in these rural places that are so essential for future food systems
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Achieving equitable diets for all: The long and winding road
Our journey to improve food systems for healthy, equitable, and sustainable diets by 2050 will be long and winding. There might be bumps along the way, but there also exist maps and signposts to guide us. A fellowship of political commitment and realism, science and data, incentives, and collectivism will help us successfully reach our targeted destination and achieve our global goals
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Malnutrition, Public Health, and Ethics
A major challenge for society today is how to secure and provide plentiful, healthy, and nutritious food for all in an environmentally sustainable and safe manner, while also addressing the multiple burdens of undernutrition, overweight and obesity, stunting and wasting, and micronutrient deficiencies, particularly for the most vulnerable. There are considerable ethical questions and trade-offs that arise when attempting to address this challenge, centered around integrating nutrition into the food security paradigm. This chapter attempts to highlight three key ethical challenges: the prioritization of key actions to address the multiple burdens of malnutrition, intergenerational justice issues of nutrition-impacted epigenetics, and the consequences of peopleâs diet choices, not only for humanity but also for the planet
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No Food Security, No World Order
Leading global experts, brought together by Johns Hopkins University, discuss national and international trends in a post-COVID-19 world.The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people and infected millions while also devastating the world economy. The consequences of the pandemic, however, go much further: they threaten the fabric of national and international politics around the world. As Henry Kissinger warned, "The coronavirus epidemic will forever alter the world order." What will be the consequences of the pandemic, and what will a post-COVID world order look like? No institution is better suited to address these issues than Johns Hopkins University, which has convened experts from within and outside of the university to discuss world order after COVID-19. In a series of essays, international experts in public health and medicine, economics, international security, technology, ethics, democracy, and governance imagine a bold new vision for our future
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Climate Change and Variability: What are the Risks for Nutrition, Diets, and Food Systems?
The paper uses a food systems approach to analyze the bidirectional relationships between climate change and food and nutrition along the entire food value chain. It then identifies adaptation and mitigation interventions for each step of the food value chain to move toward a more climate-smart, nutrition-sensitive food system. The study focuses on poor rural farmers, a population especially vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change on nutrition, although we recognize that there are other vulnerable populations, including urban poor and rural populations working outside of agriculture. Although this report does not explicitly exclude overweight and obesity, it focuses primarily on undernutrition because this nutritional status is currently more prevalent than overnutrition among our target population
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The need for nuance with dietary data
What people eat, why people make certain food choices, who has choices, how these food choices influence dietary patterns, and how these patterns impact health outcomes are still largely unknown. There are various reasons why the nutrition community has been navigating within a dietary black box. Some factors include the limited comprehensiveness, temporal coverage, use of dietary recall, expense, representativeness, disaggregation, comparability, and standardization of collecting individual dietary data. Filling these knowledge gaps is critical because the types of suboptimal dietary patterns consumed worldwide now pose significant risk factors for morbidity and mortality. Understanding what people consume, the nutritional adequacy and quality of that consumption, and its ramifications on dietary quality and nutrition outcomes is critical to construct evidence-based policy recommendations to improve diets
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