Students’ Diets are Deteriorating

According to The Guardian, at least four in 10 children consume sugary beverages daily. One in three don’t eat fruit every day.

This information was released in a global report that brings to attention the fact that most countries are at risk of not meeting nutrition targets.

“What we highlight in this report is just how important and just how diabolical the state of diets are — whether it’s for infants, young children, adolescents and adults,” said Professor Corinna Hawkes, director of the centre for food policy at City University of London and one of the lead authors of the nutrition report.

She adds that attention has been mostly on the issue of stunting growth, but has widely ignored obesity.

“The world simply has not been paying sufficient attention to diet from the perspective of malnutrition in all its forms,” she stated.

Hawkes went on to say that adults who suffer from stunted growth are more susceptible to obesity, particularly if they live in a country that has a disproportionate amount of unhealthy and processed foods.

According to the study, about 30% of students don’t eat fruit daily, while 44% drink soft drinks on a daily basis.

When over 23,000 packaged food items were analysed, it was found that approximately 69% of them were low in nutritional quality and that low and middle-income countries had lower nutritional standards.

Accessibility to healthier options oftentimes depends upon facets like time, money, and location.

If you have the money and time to prepare dishes at home rather than eating fast food, and if you live near a grocery store that stocks organic ingredients, you’re more likely to shell out the extra pounds to buy them.

But according to Hawkes, “There’s not any income group that’s eating enough vegetables, whole grains or legumes. This is a problem that goes across income groups in all parts of the world.”

Photo by Roksolana Zasiadko on Unsplash