Chapter Three
Nutrition
Transforming Food Systems to Achieve Healthy Diets for All
Marie Ruel and Inge D. Brouwer
Deterioration of diet quality and diversity because of falling incomes and disrupted food systems risks long-term consequences.
KEY FINDINGS
- Pre-pandemic, 3 billion people could not afford a healthy diet; that number could rise by 267.6 million between 2020 and 2022 due to the pandemic.
- Evidence from phone surveys in low- and middle-income countries shows widespread job and income losses and rapid rises in food insecurity due to government measures to contain the pandemic; poorer households, women, and other vulnerable groups are most affected.
- Across the globe, the quality of diets deteriorated due to disruptions in supply of fresh, healthy foods, drops in demand for these foods due to unaffordability and perishability, and increased consumption of cheaper sources of calories, including starchy staples and ultra-processed foods.
- Deteriorations in diet quality could have devastating consequences for the health and nutrition of vulnerable women and children, increasing all forms of malnutrition in the short term and causing lifelong, irreversible development, health, and nutrition damage, reversing decades of progress made so far.
- Food system transformation must support healthy diets and by doing so, serve as double duty actions that simultaneously tackle all forms of malnutrition.
KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
- Strengthen and expand coverage of targeted social protection programs, including cash and food transfers, to support healthy diets through, for example, behavior change communication focused on healthy diets and lifestyle, direct incentives such as vouchers for healthy foods, and improving the quality of school meals.
- Provide support to low- and middle-income countries for developing national food-based dietary guidelines defining the minimum dietary standards to prevent all forms of malnutrition and for formulating dietary targets for public and private investment strategies.
- Harness the influence of food environments to redirect food systems toward healthier food provision that is profitable yet supportive of optimal health and nutrition, for example, by regulating advertising and marketing of unhealthy food products or encouraging better food choices via a combination of taxes and subsidies.
- Pair large-scale demand creation and behavior change communication strategies with innovations in food environments and food supply systems and policy incentives in order to maximize impacts for healthy diets.
Browse Chapters
Chapter One
Beyond the Pandemic
Chapter Two
Resilience
Chapter Three
Nutrition
Chapter Four
Natural Resources and Environment
Chapter Five
Toward Inclusive Food Systems
Chapter Six
Food Supply Chains
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