Hunger and Health

Undernourishment and Malnutrition

Undernourishment, or the inability to satisfy dietary requirements either because of an

insufficient quantity of food or because of problems with food quality and nutritional value, is
largely a problem confined to the developing world. Undernourishment in childhood, and
especially the first two years of life, is particularly devastating, causing developmental damage
that cannot be undone. Hunger's relation to poverty is reciprocal: poverty usually results in
hunger, but hunger is a factor that keeps people in poverty. Deficiencies in nutrients such as
iodine, vitamin A, iron, and zinc contribute to weakened immune systems, anemia, learning
disabilities, complications in pregnancy and childbirth, and many childhood diseases. These
conditions result in poverty-causing problems such as absenteeism and poor performance at
school and work, unemployment, illiteracy, and the continuing cycle of poverty.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), in The
State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015—Meeting the 2015 International Hunger Targets:
Taking Stock of Uneven Progress (2015), 794.6 million people worldwide were chronically
undernourished in 2014–16. This was 216 million fewer undernourished people in the world than
in 1990–92, a 21% reduction, even while the world population increased by 1.9 billion during the
same period.

Of the world's total of chronically hungry people, 779.9 million lived in developing countries, a
figure equal to 12.9% of the developing world's total population (“Table 1. Undernourishment
around the World, 1990–92 to 2014–16,” in The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015.
Meeting the 2015 International Hunger Targets: Taking Stock of Uneven Progress, Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2015, http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4646e.pdf).
However, this also represented significant progress in reducing undernourishment since 1990–
92, when the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) in the developing world stood at 23.3%.
Even so, the 2014–16 rate of 12.9% fell short of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to
halve the PoU between 1990 and 2015, as meeting the goal would have meant arriving at a target
of 11.6% of the developing world's population.

As with other development and poverty indicators, progress toward eliminating chronic
undernourishment varied widely from region to region and country to country in the developing
world. Among all regions of the developing world for which the FAO presented data in its 2015
report, only two saw their PoU increase between 1990–92 and 2014–16: in Middle Africa it rose
from 33.5% to 41.3%; and in Western Asia it rose from 6.4% in 1990–92 to 8.4% in 2014–16
(The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015. Meeting the 2015 International Hunger
Targets: Taking Stock of Uneven Progress, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, 2015). As a whole, sub-Saharan Africa accomplished a significant reduction in hunger
levels over the course of those two decades: the percentage of people in the region who were
undernourished fell from 33.2% in 1990–92 to 23.2% in 2014–16. Nonetheless, the 2014–16
percentage remained unacceptably high, resembling or exceeding the 1990–92 hunger levels of
most other regions in the developing world.
Most of the total progress at combating hunger in this two-decade period came in the high-
population regions of Eastern Asia and Southeastern Asia. Eastern Asia, led by declines in
China, saw its hunger levels fall by more than 150 million people during the period, from 23.2%
to 9.6% of the region's population (The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015. Meeting the
2015 International Hunger Targets: Taking Stock of Uneven Progress, Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations, 2015). Southeastern Asia, led by declines in the populous
countries of Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, saw a slightly smaller decline in terms of raw
numbers, as the chronically hungry population fell from 137.5 million to 60.5 million. However,
Southeastern Asia's progress was larger than Eastern Asia's in percentage terms, as the
proportion of the hungry in the region fell from 30.6% to 9.6%. Both of these regions exceeded
the MDG, reducing PoU by more than half. Latin America and the Caribbean made more modest
progress, reducing the number of the hungry from 66.1 million to 34.3 million and the
percentage of the hungry fell from 14.7% to 5.5%. Thus, although Latin America and the
Caribbean did not quite cut its total population of hungry people in half, it still exceeded the
MDG by cutting its rate of hunger by significantly more than half.

Malnutrition refers both to the effects of chronic undernourishment and to obesity. Because
maternal undernourishment and/or undernourishment in early childhood can have irreversible
cognitive and physical effects, much of the international community's attention to malnutrition
focuses on children. The personal and societal burdens created by these forms of malnutrition are
at present more significant than those created by obesity, although the rapid growth in obesity
rates even in the developing world is cause for great concern among public health officials and
experts, particularly because of the correlation between obesity and noncommunicable diseases,
such as type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.

Besides PoU, another critical indicator for monitoring world hunger is the prevalence of
underweight children under the age of five years (CU5). The FAO reports that the developing
regions as a whole saw CU5 decline from 27.4% in 1991 to 16.6% in 2013, a 39.4% reduction
(“Tab. Prevalence of Undernourishment and Prevalence of Underweight in Children under Five
Years of Age: Progress during the MDG Monitoring Period,” in TheThe State of Food Insecurity
in the World 2015. Meeting the 2015 International Hunger Targets: Taking Stock of Uneven
Progress, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2015). Progress in the
reduction of CU5 was uneven from one region to the next. Southern Asia, which has the highest
prevalence of underweight children in the world, achieved dramatic progress, reducing CU5
from 49.2% in 1991 to 30% in 2013. Southeastern Asia also made considerable strides, cutting
CU5 almost in half (from 30.4% to 16.6%) during the same period. By contrast, sub-Saharan
Africa made much more modest gains, reducing the prevalence of CU5 from 28.5% in 1991 to
21.1% in 2013.

The consequences of malnutrition are sometimes quantified in terms of “disability-adjusted life

years” (DALYs). One DALY is equivalent to the loss of one year of healthy life, so the number
of DALYs and the DALY rate in a country or region provide a picture of the gap between
current health conditions and optimal conditions in which people enjoy maximum life
expectancy and a disease-free old age. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO)
Global Health Observatory data (2016), all regions of the world saw reductions in DALYs
between 2000 and 2012. Although the largest decline (32%) was seen in the WHO Africa region,
this region still experienced the highest DALYs in the world in 2012, with 740 DALYs per 1,000
population, compared with 273 per 1,000 population in the WHO Western Pacific region, where
DALYs were lowest. The WHO also notes a significant global reduction—from 40% in 2000 to
30% in 2012—in the proportion of total DALYs borne by children under the age of 15 years, an
indication of the substantial improvements in child mortality rates during the same period.

Reference

https://www.gale.com/open-access/poverty