August
2000
The
New Malnutrition in a Land of Excess
By Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil
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Today, Ethiopia and its neighbors are once again
in the grip of an unrelenting famine which has left more than 16 million
people on the
brink of starvation.
The Horn of Africa has become synonymous with famine and malnutrition.
But across the Ocean, the U.S. is currently facing an epidemic that
has left not tens of millions but more than 100 million people malnourished—a
quarter of them morbidly so. This growing problem receives little attention
as a public health disaster, despite warnings from health officials
that malnourishment has reached epidemic levels and has left vast
numbers of people sick, less productive, and far more likely to die prematurely.
In the U.S., 55 percent of adults are overweight and 23 percent are
obese. And overeating is growing in poorer nations as well, even when
hunger remains stubbornly high. The concept of malnutrition is stretching
to encompass excess as well as deficiency. While hunger is a more acute
problem and should be the highest nutritional concern, overeating is
the fastest growing form of malnourishment in the world according to
the World Health Organization (WHO). For the first time in history,
the number of overweight people rivals the number who are underweight,
both estimated at 1.1 billion.
Since the turn of the century, traditional diets featuring whole
grains, vegetables and fruits have been supplanted by diets rich
in meat, dairy
products, and highly processed items that are loaded with fat and
sugar. The proliferation of high-calorie, high-fat foods that are
widely available,
heavily promoted, low in cost and nutrition, and served in huge portions
has created what Yale University psychologist Kelly Brownell calls
a "toxic food environment." Sweets and fats increasingly
crowd out nutritionally complete foods that provide essential micronutrients.
When these eating habits are combined with increasingly urbanized,
automated
and more sedentary lifestyles, it becomes clear why gaining weight
is often difficult to avoid.
Failure to recognize the existence of this negative food environment
has created the widespread misconception that individuals are entirely
to blame for overeating. The reality is that most countries embrace
policies and practices that promote mass overconsumption of unhealthy
foods, but abandon citizens when it comes to dealing with the health
implications. Because individuals are stigmatized as weak-willed
or prone to obesity, prevailing efforts to curb overeating have focused
on techno-fixes and diets, not prevention and nutrition education.
For
example, liposuction is now the leading form of cosmetic surgery
in
the U.S. with 400,000 operations performed each year; designer "foods"
such as olestra promise worry-free consumption of nutritionally empty
snacks; and laboratories scurry to find the "fat gene" in
an effort to engineer our way out of obesity.
Consumers get the majority of their dietary cues about food from
companies, who spend more on advertising—$30 billion each year in the U.S.
alone—than any other industry. The most heavily advertised foods,
unfortunately, tend to be of dubious nutritional value. And food
advertisers disproportionately target children, the least savvy consumers,
in order
to shape lifelong habits. In the U.S., the average child watches
10,000 commercials each year, and more than 90 percent of these ads
are for
sugary cereals, candy, soda, or other junk food.
Food companies have also begun to target the school environment. More
than 5,000 American schools now have contracts with fast-food establishments
to provide either food services, vending machines, or both. Soda companies
have offered millions of dollars to cash-strapped school districts for
exclusive rights to sell their products in schools.
With industrial country markets increasingly saturated, many food
corporations are now looking to developing countries for greater
profits. Mexico
recently surpassed the U.S. as the top per capita consumer of Coca-Cola,
for example. And that company’s 1998 annual report notes that Africa’s
rapid growth and low per capita consumption of carbonated beverages
makes that continent "a land of opportunity for us." The number
of American fast-food restaurants operating around the world is also
growing rapidly: four of the five McDonald’s restaurants that
open every day are located outside the U.S.
A world raised on Big Macs and soda isn’t inevitable. But countering
an increasingly ubiquitous toxic food environment will require dispelling
the myths that surround overeating. Governments will have to recognize
the existence of a health epidemic of overeating, and will have to
work
to counter the social pressures that promote poor eating habits.
Empowering individuals through education about nutrition and healthy
eating habits,
particularly for children, is also essential.
Gary Gardner is a senior researcher and Brian Halweil is
a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute. They are co-authors
of Worldwatch Paper 150, "Overfed and Underfed: The Global Epidemic
of Malnutrition" (2000). The above is an extract, reprinted with
kind permission, from "Escaping Hunger, Escaping Excess," published
in the July/August 2000 issue of Worldwatch. To get a copy of their
paper or to read the entire article, contact the Worldwatch
Institute at www.worldwatch.org
or (202) 451-1992.
