Читать книгу Hidden Hunger and the Transformation of Food Systems - Группа авторов - Страница 43

Although the Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016–2025) have prioritized nutrition, greater efforts and intentionality must be made to address the growing crisis of malnutrition and hidden hunger to reach our goals in the next 5 years, especially in school-aged children and adolescents living in LMICs. The nexus between the food system and hidden hunger in this specific demographic is complex and influenced by many macro-level factors, such as national policies, effects of climate change, and conflict settings on food security and nutrition, industrialization on agriculture, and large-scale processes of food production, distribution, and marketing; as well as micro-level factors, including the personal and external food environments with which they interact, unique physiological needs, and increasing autonomy over food choice and intake.

The UNICEF Innocenti Framework clearly depicts the diverse drivers, determinants, and key components of the food system that each contribute to and affect the diets of children and adolescents, highlighting the numerous actors and subsequent entry points and ways in which the issue of hidden hunger and double burden of malnutrition can be addressed. Given its multifaceted and cross-cutting nature, synergy, collaboration, and coordination between various systems and actors are required. A holistic systems approach to nutrition with a “right to food” lens is highly recommended [2, 5, 13]. This approach involves interactions of the food system with four other global systems: health, water and sanitation, education, and social protection, and in doing so holds other systems and sectors that are able to provide nutrition interventions at scale accountable for nutrition of the global population. Ultimately, transformation of the food system through political, economic, nutrition-specific, and nutrition-sensitive actions is principal to ensuring the delivery of safe, affordable, and sustainable food worldwide, especially to the most vulnerable. Finally, it is important to consider that efforts to address hidden hunger should incorporate actions that address overweight and obesity, including physical inactivity [28], to comprehensively tackle the double burden of malnutrition in our global population.