Eating habits are getting worse around the world, but some countries are doing quite well.
What we eat has a huge impact on our health, but we don’t really pay as much attention to it as we probably should. It’s not hard to see that the world really isn’t eating healthy, all over the world obesity has tripled in the last 50 years, and more than 2 billion adults are overweight (and childhood obesity is also on the rise). At the same time, close to a billion people are undernourished.
To be sure, we still have a lot to figure out when it comes to the global food system. Part of this problem can be attributed to how many we eat, but another part is what we eat. In 2015, a group of researchers looked at what people around the world eat.
Around the world in 2,000 calories
The study only looked at the nutritional quality of what people eat, not how much people eat. In other words, they looked at how many healthy and unhealthy foods tend to be in diets around the world and how the two sides balance out. The study simply looked at how diets around the world would compare if they all had 2,000 calories per day (an important distinction considering the average American consumes 3,600 calories a day, and 1 in 4 people in sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished). So with this important distinction, how do diets compare in different countries?
It’s probably safe to say that few people would expect the United States to top any list for healthy nutrition, but it’s plausible to expect richer countries to have better diets; after all, they can afford it. But that’s not at all what the researchers found. People from sub-Saharan Africa (and especially West Africa) ranked significantly better than the richest countries in Europe and North America.
The main conclusion of the study is that in much of the world, eating habits are getting worse. Global consumption of healthy foods increased, but in high-income countries it was often outpaced by rising intakes of unhealthy foods, the study found. Other countries, such as India or Uruguay, also did relatively well.
The team looked at intake of healthy foods (such as vegetables and legumes) and unhealthy foods (such as processed meat). They found that in many richer countries, intake of healthier foods is increasing, but is offset by intake of unhealthy foods. Basically, they’re eating a little more healthy stuff, but a lot more unhealthy stuff; so overall, in much of the world, the quality of diets is declining.
The West African diet is rich in starch and vegetables, and low in meat. It also has a large amount of fat. The staple dish in some cultures in this area is a dish called fufu, which combines root vegetables such as yams or cassava along with a soup or stew. West African cuisine also features more seafood and green leafy vegetables than the rest of the continent.
People around the world eat many different things. Some are healthy and some are less so. If you want to draw some conclusions from the study, you don’t necessarily need to be inspired by a particular area, but there are some trends you can follow. In general, diets low in processed foods are healthier, as are those low in saturated fat and red meat. Diets that include lots of plant-based foods tend to be healthier, and of course not eating too much (or too little) is essential to a healthy diet.
The study “Diet quality among men and women in 187 countries in 1990 and 2010: a systematic evaluation” was published in Cell.
