A new United Nations report Tuesday warned that the prevalence of adult obesity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has tripled since 1975, affecting one in four adults in a region where hunger has grown once again, reaching 42.5 million people.
The Panorama of Food and Nutritional Security 2019 report has been developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme (WFP).
It calls on Latin America and Caribbean countries to develop urgent actions to address the increase in malnutrition.
The report highlights the need to promote healthier food environments through taxes and incentives that favour healthy food, social protection systems, school feeding programmes and the regulation of food advertising and marketing.
The UN agencies also stress the importance of improving food labelling with frontal nutritional warning systems, ensuring the safety and quality of food sold on the street, and reformulating the composition of certain products to ensure their nutritional contribution.
According to the Panorama report, the most significant increase in adult obesity in the region was observed in the Caribbean, where the percentage quadrupled, rising from six per cent in 1975 to 25 per cent, an increase in absolute terms from 760,000 to 6.6 million people.
“The explosive increase in obesity, which affects 24 per cent of the regional population, about 105 million people, almost double the global level of 13.2 per cent, not only has huge economic costs, but also threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands”, said the FAO’s Regional Representative, Julio Berdegué.
According to the report, every year 600,000 people die in Latin America and the Caribbean due to diseases related to poor diets, such as diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases.
Inadequate diets are associated with more deaths than any other risk factor, something that threatens our future generations, since the rates of both childhood and adolescent obesity have tripled between 1990 and 2016.
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“We must act now to reverse this trend and prevent children from suffering the consequences of poor diets on their health and their future quality of life,” said PAHO/WHO Director Dr. Carissa F. Etienne.
“To achieve this, we need the commitment of the whole society and public policies that regulate unhealthy food products, create environments conducive to physical activity and promote healthy eating at school and at the family table,” the Dominican-born director said.
The publication highlights that the region is worse than the rest of the world in the majority of malnutrition indicators related to excessive calorie intake: overweight has doubled since the 1970s, and today affects 59.5 per cent of adults in the region, 262 million people, while globally the rate is 20 percentage points lower: 39.1 per cent
In contrast, the region has lower undernourishment rates than the world, 6.5 per cent for the region versus 10.8 worldwide, – stunting nine per cent versus 21.9, and much lower rates of wasting 1.3 per cent, versus 7.3 for the world.
However, the UN agencies warn of the worrying increase in hunger, which has grown again by 4.5 million people since 2014 –an increase of 11 percent– reaching 42.5 million in 2018, its highest point of the last decade.
The Panorama report makes a detailed analysis of how the food environment of the region has changed, understood as the space of interaction between people and the physical, economic, political and socio-cultural conditions that influence the way they acquire, prepare and consume food.
Sales of ultra-processed food products are the fastest growing in Latin America and they increase the population’s exposure to excessive amounts of sugar, sodium and fat. Between 2000 and 2013, the consumption of ultra-processed products grew by more than 25 per cent, and fast food consumption grew almost 40 per cent.
“In Latin America and the Caribbean, too many children eat too little healthy food and too much processed food,” said Bernt Aasen, UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “Almost one in five children under five years are malnourished or overweight, which prevents them from growing well. It is everyone’s task to ensure healthy food is available and affordable for all families, especially the most vulnerable. ”
The expansion of supermarket chains and the preponderance of large food processing industries is another major change in the regional food environment, one which has made ultra-processed products available everywhere, and at lower prices than nutritious food.
Poor people have been hardest hit by these changes, since for this population group it is often easier and cheaper to access unhealthy rather than healthy food.
The report notes that the region has reacted to the rise in malnutrition through a series of public policies, implementing food labelling laws, which allow consumers to make better decisions as well as having improved regulation on food advertising.
Some countries have adopted fiscal and social measures that seek to favour adequate food. The Panorama report stresses that social protection and school feeding programs, public food supply and marketing systems and policies that promote food safety and quality are essential to improve nutrition.
“If we expand social protection programs in our region, we would better face the double burden that hunger and obesity represent for communities and families,” said WFP Regional Director Miguel Barreto, adding “these are t