The fast urbanization of more nations is a double-edged sword. On one hand, businesses and several industries add jobs and cash inflow, and locals have more opportunities to generate bigger income. On the other, people have spare cash to buy products of “western” franchises like fast foods, pizza shops and burger joints.
A new research reported by CNN’s Vital Signs is centered on how the so-called western diet is expanding across the globe.
Published in the journal Nature, researchers found that more people living in urban areas prefer diet with more meat and calories. David Tilman, professor of Ecology at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the research, said this trend can lead to increased risk of diseases linked to diet with fatty and sugary foods.
This trend is producing a group of malnourished people who don’t follow the more traditional causes of malnutrition, Tilman said.
“This group is composed of people who are malnourished because they eat foods with no nutritional benefits.”
Tilman and co-author Michael Clark underlined the three trends linked to the growing per capita of nations, and the demand for western diets. From 1961 to 2009, they noticed the growing demand for meat protein and that the top 15 nations with the highest GDP per capita had 750% greater per capita demand than the group comprising 24 poor countries.
The second trend is the income-dependent increase in demand for empty calories. Tilman and Clark said foods with “empty calories” have calories provided by refined fats, refined sugars, alcohols and oils. They discovered that in 2009, the countries with the highest per capita GDP had an average per capita empty calorie demand of 1,400 kcal a day, while the group of nations with the lowest per capita GDP had an average demand of just 285 kcal per day.
The third trend is the increasing total per capita caloric demand alongside the growth of income. This trend includes wasted foods.
“The proportion wasted tends to increase with per capita GDP,” the study said, so much so that the actual per capita consumption of meat, empty and total calories may be about 20 to 25% lower than the demand in the top 15 nations, and 5% for the lowest 24.
The 15 nations comprise the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The group of 24 comprised nations in Africa and Haiti.
