Monday, February 17, 2014

UN Fears Next Generation Could Have Worse Nutrition than Parents

The United Nations is concerned that this generation of children could be less well-nourished than the previous, living in developed nations hit by devastating economic crisis.
David Nabarro, UN Special Representative for Food Security and Nutrition told the Huffington Post UK that nutrition of the next generation was a key concern for the international body, rather than just the amount of food a child was given to eat.

Speaking at the Economist's Feeding the World conference in London this week, Nabarro said that the generational divide would be something looked at "closely" at a conference on the subject in Rome in November.

"The natural assumption is when a country is rich, the GDP is good, you imagine everyone is well-nourished, possibly too well-nourished," he said.

"But the differences are begin to worry us, and I would advise people to be on the look out for quite serious pockets of people whose nutrition is substandard, where social systems are not working as well as they might be."

There is a caveat to that, Nabarro added, saying it was always "difficult to say things are worse now than before, because we don't have to go many years back in Europe to find quite major periods of time with widespread poor nutrition. But it is something to look out for, as we move forward."

Nabarro said that he hoped the international community will move "beyond talking about food security to talking about nutrition security".

"There are 800-900 million people who don't access the food they need, but there are even more people who do not access the nutrients they need, particularly between conception and a child's second birthday," he said.

Source; Huffington Post