“For the first time in human history, the number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people. While the world's underfed population has declined slightly since 1980 to 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people has surged to 1.1 billion.
Both the overweight and the underweight suffer from malnutrition, a deficiency or excess in a person's intake of nutrients and other dietary elements needed for healthy living. The public health impact is enormous: more than half of the world's disease burden measured in "years of healthy life lost" is attributable to hunger, overeating, and widespread vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
The number of hungry people remains high in a world of food surpluses. In the developing world, there are 150 million underweight children, nearly one in three. And in Africa, both the share and the absolute number of children who are underweight are on the rise.
Meanwhile, the population of overweight people has expanded rapidly in recent decades, more than offsetting the health gains from the modest decline in hunger. In the United States, 55 percent of adults are overweight by international standards. A whopping 23 percent of American adults are considered obese. And the trend is spreading to children as well, with one in five American kids now classified as overweight. [Note: Iowa has the 18th highest rate of obesity in the United States. Over 60% of Iowans are afflicted. Iowa kids rank 41st in terms of physical fitness*.]
Surprisingly, overweight and obesity are advancing rapidly in the developing world as well. In Brazil and Colombia, for example, 36 and 41 percent, respectively, of the population is overweight, levels that match those of many European countries. Still struggling to eradicate infectious diseases, many developing nations' health care systems could be crippled by growing caseloads of chronic illness.
The specific consequences of hunger and being overweight can be very different. Hunger hits children the hardest, increasing their vulnerability to infectious diseases or conditions such as diarrhea, which often lead to permanent mental and physical impairment or even death. Excess weight gain, on the other hand, takes its greatest toll in adulthood, leading to chronic, but reversible, conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.
While the myth persists that hunger results from a scarcity of food, inequitable distribution of resources and gender discrimination prevent most of the world's hungry from getting enough to eat. Some 80 percent of the world's hungry children live in countries with food surpluses, for example. The common thread that runs through nearly all hunger, in rich and poor nations alike, is poverty.
In nations where overeating is a problem, policymakers need a different set of tools. Attention must focus on behavioral patterns like poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyles that underlie obesity."
Borlaug-Ruan Internship