By Silvia Landi, winner of the “Photo Unpublished” category in the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation Food Sustainability Media Award 2017.
* Any views expressed in this photo essay are those of the author and not of the Thomson Reuters Foundation
In recent decades the world has seen a new emergency emerging – Globesity – which is considered an epidemic by the World Health Organization that threatens the health of all nations. Currently the percentage of obese people in the world is growing at double the rate of people who suffer from hunger or malnutrition. For the first time in history, the world has more overweight than underweight people, and adult obesity is more common globally than undernutrition. Globally about 1.9 billion adults, 340 million children and adolescents, and 41 million children aged under 5 are overweight or obese.
Obesity was, for a long time, seen as the result of the lifestyle in rich countries like the United States, but now the social, economic and political causes of Globesity are put down to not just excess food but to poor quality food and the lack of access for poorer populations to quality foods and adequate medical care. The World Food Programme says undernutrition - when people do not get enough food – and obesity – itself a form of malnutrition - are two sides of the same coin, and together inflict a “double burden” of disease on people and economies globally.
