What are the major food and nutrition challenges impacting human and environmental health?

Nutrition is a scientific discipline focused on understanding the impact of food and nutrients on
health and disease (Part III).

Nutritional problems (Chapter 2) generally relate to both the quantity and quality of food in the
diet, ranging from insufficient energy intake (undernutrition) to intake imbalanced with expenditure
(over nutrition). Inadequate consumption of nutrients required for health, growth, and
development (malnutrition) mostly occurs as a consequence of limited food intake or reliance upon
too few foods that constrains nutrient intake. Malnutrition may also occur in over nourished
individuals if the diet is severely imbalanced.

For the vast majority of human history, humans were most likely to suffer from under- and
malnutrition due to food scarcity. These remain major public health challenges across the globe,
particularly in low- and middle- income countries. FAO defines undernourishment (aka,
undernutrition) as an inability to acquire enough food to meet daily minimum dietary energy
(calorie) requirements for normal health and activity during the course of a year; chronic
undernourishment is defined as hunger. Hunger is not due to a lack of food: the world produces
more than enough calories to feed every person on the planet. Rather, hunger is the primary result
of poverty, as well as sociopolitical factors that prevent access and distribution like natural disasters,
wars and conflicts, financial crises impacting food price and trade, and inadequate infrastructure.

During the later decades of the 20th century, some scientists became increasingly cognizant of
food’s impact not just on individual human bodies but also on our shared local and global
environments.

Thus emerged a discipline sometimes referred to as “nutritional ecology,” or environmental

nutrition. The four- quadrant model of nutritional ecology includes health, environment, economy,
and society and is the working model for this book; it emphasizes health and environmental aspects
of food choices in particular.

Of course, the idea that how we grow, produce, and distribute food impacts systems beyond our
own health is not new. In 1906, Upton Sinclair ’s The Jungle highlighted the atrocities in the
American meatpacking industry, which mostly impacted the working poor, recent immigrants to the
US. This seminal work led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, which
improved conditions and protected workers. More than 50 years later Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962) detailed the impact of agricultural chemicals on ecosystems and human health. It is credited
for launching the modern environmental movement. The cry for a more sustainable food system
and less meat consumption was the topic of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971).
And philosopher Peter Singer ’s treatise Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of
Animals (1975) discouraged consumption of animals by decrying “speciesism,” which challenges the
notion that any one species owns another and argues that it is the ability to suffer— not
intelligence— that should guide our treatment of animals and, hence, their consumption. More
recently, Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s The Ethics of What We Eat (2006) sounded a siren on the
inhumane ways in which animals are raised for food production. Many of the same environmental
nutrition issues introduced in these books remain problems today; some have grown in magnitude,
like water and land pollution. Still others, like antibiotic resistance (Chapter 12) and climate change
(Chapter 3), are newly appreciated as mounting threats to local communities and the global
environment.