By Kennedy Shelley
The World Health Organization released a new report with worrying trends about nutrition around the planet.
If you believe that a good diet is the core foundation for good health, then many are in great danger.
There are two disturbing trends in the UN report – #1 Global hunger continues to rise, and #2 Global obesity continues to rise.
There are over 821 million chronically malnourished people on the planet at any given time in 2018, 10 million more than in 2017.
But at the same time, the number of children who are overweight continues to grow at an alarming rate.
Both of these trends are dangerous and threaten to bring down any nations health care system.
Malnourished people have lower IQ’s and are susceptible to a host of infections, stunted growth, and diseases.
While overweight people tend to develop type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Naoko Yamamoto, Assistant Director-General at the WHO said:
“In order to provide quality health services and achieve Universal Health Coverage, nutrition should be positioned as one of the cornerstones of essential health packages.”
The problem with the report is that it tended to focus on specific nutrients and not the diet itself.
For instance, the recommendations included supplementing iron and folic acid.
It is really impossible to supplement your way out of an inadequate or bad diet.
On the plus side, they did finally come out against sugar. They emphasize the need to reduce added sugar consumption in the world.
But for some reason, they continued to emphasize the need to reduce the amount of salt. Freedom Health News has called into question this idea.
The study brought up this alarming trend too:
“Among adults, the most recent data available from 2014 indicate that 462 million are underweight, while 1.9 billion are overweight, and 600 million of those (or approximately 13% of the world’s population, a rate that doubled between 1980 and 2014) are obese. Adult overweight, obesity, and diabetes are rising in nearly every region and country.”
Why is this happening? The western diet is spreading.
We have parts of the planet where you can’t get clean water, but you can get a sugary soft drink.
Processed foods are taking over traditional diets.
There was an interesting study of the Maasai tribe in Africa which shows their diet is almost entirely made up of milk and meat.
They are remarkably healthy, lean and have no heart disease.
Until they leave the tribe to go to the city and start eating processed foods.
Then they start to gain weight and have heart problems. (See this article in Freedom Health News for more information)
The World Health Organization is a huge bureaucracy that tends to get caught up in the weeds, while missing the bigger picture.
They also tend not to want to pick fights with global food companies like Nestle, Coke, and Pepsi who fund a great deal of their private research.
So, while the World Health Organization is absolutely correct in their concerns about global nutrition and why it needs to be prioritized, its specific recommendations and targets are actually not solving the root problem which is processed foods and sugar flooding the planet.
