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August 2000
The New Malnutrition in a Land of Excess

By Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil

 

 

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.

 


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