Dietary habits – Another potential Cause Area?

Abstract

When thinking on boosting global health through better diets, one might think on tackling hunger or malnutrition. And unfortunately hunger and malnutrition are still huge problems worth working on. I will try to focus on dietary habits. The effects of people making unhealthy food choices. Although basically everyone knows that a poor diet is “somehow bad”, there is emerging evidence on “how bad”. The average diet is too high in sodium and too low in whole grains, fruits, nuts and seeds etc. This reduces expected lifespan by many years and greatly reduces expected life quality. The effects seem to be higher than the effects of all mental illnesses or the effects of alcohol- and tobacco- consumption combined. Furthermore, these effects are putting a heavy burden on society through direct and indirect costs. In most studies the effects of hunger, hidden hunger, malnutrition and bad food choices are mixed up. And there are different definitions of all these concepts. It is hard (at least for me) to present good data on the precise amount of the problem of “dietary habits” as subproblem of diets in general. But nourishment (hunger, hidden hunger, malnutrition, food choices etc.) is such a huge problem that even if dietary habits make up “only” a third of it one should consider these habits as a goal by itself. Tackling it needs different approaches.