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

Non-Communicable Diseases, Food Systems and the Sustainable Development Goals

During the era of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), non-communicable diseases (NCDs), along with overweight and obesity, increased among populations almost everywhere. NCDs are currently the most common cause of death and disability worldwide, accounting for 68% of global mortality, or two out of every three deaths. Connected with a rise in obesity and NCDs, we are facing an unprecedented change in demography, epidemiology and diets. Diet is the number one risk factor for NCD-related morbidity and mortality. The health and agriculture sectors have an essential role to play in the prevention and treatment of both communicable diseases and NCDs. Food and health systems need to work synergistically to bring about effective change. Creating innovative ways of acknowledging and identifying nutrition issues, providing and implementing comprehensive nutrition interventions, and delivering nutrition education for preventative purposes will also be essential in order to reverse NCD trends

The Nutrition Challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to some of the most nutritionally insecure people in the world. Poor infrastructure and limited resources compounded with conflict, HIV, and poor access to health services are factors that contribute to the staggering levels of malnutrition and food insecurity on the continent. Despite these enormous challenges, some countries in Africa are making progress towards food and nutrition security and there has never been a better time to work towards improved human development that has nutrition as a goal

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

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 people’s diet choices, not only for humanity but also for the planet

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

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

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

The utilisation of wild foods in Mediterranean Tunisia: commentary on the identification and frequency of consumption of wild edible plants over a year in central Tunisia: a mixed-methods approach (Dop et al., n.d.)

The study in this issue by Dop et al.(Reference Dop, Kefi and Karous11) sought to identify the frequency of consumption of ‘wild’ edible plants consumed by women in rural Tunisia. They also studied the availability of these foods by seasons, within their immediate environment and in markets, and characterised the perceptions of their use and mainstay within diets. They utilised qualitative methods including interviews and focus groups, used ethnobotanical tools to collect and identify wild plant species, performed market surveys to assess availability and access and carried out FFQs. FFQs were used to capture longer recalls of diets retrospectively and allowed for the inclusion of these often forgotten or neglected wild foods

Addressing Capacity Challenges: Breaking down silos in the nutrition community

Key messages > Nutrition is a multi-temporal, multi-facted, multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary issue, and there are many forms of mal- nutrition that plague society. > In this trans-disciplinary space, nutrition professionals need to be fluent in discussing the concepts and constructs of other disciplines. > Four challenges need to be dealt with in the near future: 1. We are trained to understand only our field of discipline, and those disciplines in and of themselves are complex. 2. We are not trained to think about other sectors or even more so, other systems. 3. We are not trained to think about how to work differently and in what timescale. 4. The nutrition community has its own silos and divisions that rarely cross paths. > It is essential to jointly bridge the divides within the nutrition communities in order to answer complex challenges in order to address malnutrition in all its forms