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Food Systems for Improved Health: the Concept
What Is a Food System?
Health and well-being depend on many activities concerned with the production, processing, acquisition and utilization of foods. The inter-relationships and interdependencies constitute a Food System functioning within several environments.
Food Systems in Failure
The world's food systems have evolved with little explicit attention to the balance and quality of their nutrient outputs, or to their abilities to support good health. The fact that malnutrition affects some 40% of the world's people attests to this fact. Many people, particularly poor children and their mothers, must depend on diets that are inadequate in several nutrients, and problems of under-nutrition are increasingly seen along side of problems of over-nutrition, in a world that now appears to produce enough total food to meet its current energy and protein needs.
Falling Behind Current Knowledge
Efforts to alleviate malnutrition in the developing countries have been targeted on increasing supplies of energy and protein but only a few micronutrients (vitamin A, iron and iodine) because deficiencies of these nutrients have been or are responsible for the ill-health of millions of people. Still, millions of women and children in poor countries are also malnourished with respect to other vitamins (riboflavin, folate, vitamin B12) and minerals (selenium, calcium, copper and, probably, chromium and boron). Few programs have addressed these deficiencies; and none has undertaken to implement in poor countries such recent findings as the cancer-preventive effect of selenium; the heart-protective effects of folate, vitamin E and perhaps copper; and the anti-diabetic effect of chromium; the reduction of bone loss by boron. Contemporary nutrition knowledge is not being translated into programs in the developing world.
Need for a New Approach
The constituent elements of food systems have generally been addressed only in isolation, rather than as parts of integrated systems. Indeed, the scientific support base for these activities has been constructed largely along disciplinary lines: research, training and outreach activities relating to food systems have been developed and deployed in separate and poorly interacting programs. Sustainable solutions to diet-related health problems is beyond the capabilities of individual disciplines or sectors; these problems are best addressed using approaches that consider all relevant causal variables and that conceive of objectives in multi-disciplinary terms. This calls for trans-disciplinary and trans-sectoral efforts that address food systems in holistic ways.
While agricultural success has been measured in terms of yields and costs, food systems approaches add measures of impacts on human nutritional status and health, as well as environmental, economic and social sustainability. This view constitutes a new paradigm, expanding the view of agriculture and food as instruments of public health.