Food quality and human nutrition

New nutritional analyses suggest that current trends in the production of food are inappropriate for the health of most of the world's populations. Four deficiency problems now dominate analyses of the nutritional disorders of developing countries: the risks from iodine, vitamin A and iron deficiencies and protein energy malnutrition now affect over two billion children and adults. Chronic energy deficiency affects half of Indian adults, with similar rates in Pakistan and Ethiopia. India will need to increase food production two- to three-fold by 2020 to cope with the predicted population explosion and desirable increases in food consumption. As erosion, salination and environmental degradation further limit land availability, current problems will overwhelm agricultural demand. Societies increase their meat, milk and fat consumption as they become affluent, and suffer from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancers and a variety of other 'Western' public health problems. Agricultural production is then regeared inappropriately. The Second World has an agriculture system geared to 1940s Western concepts of high animal production. Russia now vies with Scotland and Northern Ireland for the highest heart disease rates in the world and has the fattest adults in Europe. Most major non-infective public health issues throughout the world are nutritionally related. Global warming will exacerbate these problems, but effective dietary change with less animal production could release land which could be used more efficiently.