www.bendib.com/environment/
9-22.-Obesity.jpg
Feast
or Famine
Integrating
The Food Museum Online's Exhibits and Issues
features to explore the
twin challenges facing our planet in the 21st
century: over a billion people are overnourished
and nearly another billion are malnourished.
http://www.sln.org.uk/geography/images/obesity%20cartoon.gif
In
perhaps the first ever conference of its kind,
The World
Food Prize International Symposium (October
12-14 in Des Moines, Iowa, USA) will address,
in the words of their press release: "the
dual global challenges of hunger and malnutrition
in developing countries, and obesity and overnutrition
in the developed nations."
About
one third of the planet's people are suffering
because they eat too much or too little. We divide
our report into "Feast:The Obesity Issue"
and "Famine:The Hunger Issue."
Feast
The Obesity Issue
Graphic: Obesity
Rates Worldwide
"At
the other end of the malnutrition scale, obesity
is one of today’s most blatantly visible
– yet most neglected
– public health problems. Paradoxically
coexisting with undernutrition, an escalating
global epidemic of overweight and obesity –
“globesity” – is taking over
many parts of the world. If immediate action
is not taken, millions will suffer from an array
of serious health disorders.
Obesity
is a complex condition, one with serious social
and psychological dimensions, that affects virtually
all age and socioeconomic groups and threatens
to overwhelm both developed and developing countries.
In 1995, there were an estimated 200 million
obese adults worldwide and another 18 million
under-five children classified as overweight.
As of 2000, the number of obese adults has increased
to over 300 million. Contrary to conventional
wisdom, the obesity epidemic is not restricted
to industrialized societies; in developing countries,
it is estimated that over 115 millionpeople
suffer from obesity-related problems.
Generally,
although men may have higher rates of overweight,
women have higher rates of obesity. For both,
obesity poses a major risk for serious diet-related
noncommunicable diseases, including diabetes
mellitus, cardiovascular disease, hypertension
and stroke, and certain forms of cancer. Its
health consequences range from increased risk
of premature death to serious chronic conditions
that reduce the overall quality of life."
---from The
World Health Organization's 'Controlling
the global obesity epidemic.'
Click
here to read our full report "Feast: The
Obesity Issue"
Famine
The Hunger Issue
www.photoshopdiva.com/
images/new_gallerys/pol...
Bread for the World Institute
compiled the following statistics:
852 million people across the world are hungry,
up from 842 million a year ago.
In essence, hunger
is the most extreme form of poverty, where individuals
or families cannot afford to meet their most basic
need for food.
Hunger manifests
itself in many ways other than starvation and
famine. Most poor people who battle hunger deal
with chronic undernourishment and vitamin or mineral
deficiencies, which result in stunted growth,
weakness and heightened susceptibility to illness.
Countries in which a large portion of the population
battles hunger daily are usually poor and often
lack the social safety nets we enjoy, such as
soup kitchens, food stamps, and job training programs.
When a family that lives in a poor country cannot
grow enough food or earn enough money to buy food,
there is nowhere to turn for help. Click
here to read the rest of these facts and check
the sources.
Click
here to read our full report "Famine: The
Hunger Issue"
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