Top News for Medical Students October 29, 2018 (1 of 2)

Forget all those calls to eat less meat and more plants for better health and a stronger planet – new research shows that the world does not produce enough fruits and vegetables to feed everyone.

Canadian researchers have compared global agricultural production with the kind of diet advocated by nutritionists – and favored by environmentalists – and said they have found a "fundamental gap" between what is produced and what the world's population really needs.

"We simply can not adopt a healthy diet in the current global agricultural system," said study co-author Evan Fraser in a statement.

"The results show that the global system is currently overproducing grains, fats and sugars," added Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

But he lacks fruits and vegetables, he said.

Recent research has urged consumers to consume less meat to feed the world's growing population without causing irreparable damage to the environment.

Livestock is responsible for about 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the United States. scientists say that eating less meat could help.

According to the United Nations, the world is at risk of stifling heat waves, extreme rainfall and falling harvests, unless unprecedented efforts are made to keep the temperature at a maximum of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Small portions

The Canadian study, published this week in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, calculated the amount of food produced relative to the recommendations of Harvard University's Healthy Eating Plate.

The guide recommends that fruits and vegetables make up half of all diets, with whole grains at 25%, protein, fat and dairy products the rest.

He divided the food groups into servings and found that the world currently produces 12 servings of cereals per person instead of the recommended 8 servings. 5 portions of fruits and vegetables instead of 15; and 4 portions of sugar instead of nothing.

If neither diet nor farming practices change, the world will need 12 million hectares of arable land and 1.3 billion hectares of land by the end of 2050 to feed a population estimated to 9.8 billion inhabitants, the study added.

Lawrence Hadad, executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), said that fruits and vegetables are getting more and more expensive, due to low demand, low productivity and high losses in storage and transport.

"To change this dynamic, governments should give high priority to the consumption of fruits and vegetables in nutrition and health plans," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Governments around the world have promoted various healthy eating policies, calling on increasingly obese populations to replace processed foods containing sugar and starchy foods with more fruits and vegetables to increase their consumption. longevity and improve health in general.

Fruits and vegetables are at the heart of the fight against all forms of malnutrition, but almost all agricultural research and development focuses on cereals, said Hadad, winner of the World Food Prize, founded in 1986 by Nobel laureate Norman Bourlag and nicknamed the Nobel Prize. for agriculture.

-Thin Lei Win