Promoting healthy diets and lifestyles to reduce the global burden of noncommunicable diseases requires a multisectoral approach involving the various relevant sectors in societies.
The agriculture and food sector figures prominently in this enterprise and must be given due importance in any consideration of the promotion of healthy diets for individuals and populations groups.
Food strategies must not merely be directed at ensuring food security for all, but must also achieve the consumption of adequate quantities of safe and good quality that together make up a healthy diet.
Any recommendation to that effect will have implications for all components in the food chain.
It is therefore useful at this juncture to examine trends in consumption patterns worldwide and deliberate on the potential of the food and agriculture sector to meet the demands and challenges.
Economics development is normally accompanied by improvements in county’s food supply and the gradual elimination of dietary deficiencies, thus improving the overall nutritional status of the country’s population.
Furthermore, it also brings about qualitative changes in the production, processing, distribution and marketing of food.
Increasing urbanization will also have consequences for the dietary patterns and lifestyles of individual not all of which are positive.
Changes in diets, patterns of work and leisure - often referred to as the “nutrition transition” – are already continuing to the causal factors underlying noncommunicable disease even in the poorest countries.
Moreover, the pace of these changes seems to be accelerating, especially in the low income and middle income countries.
The dietary changes that characterize the “nutrition transition” include both quantitative and qualitative changes in the diet.
The adverse dietary changes include shifts in the structure of the diet toward a higher energy density diet with a greater role for fat and added sugars in foods, greater saturated fat intake (mostly from animal sources), reduced intakes of complex carbohydrates and dietary fiber and reduced fruit and vegetable intakes.
These dietary changes are compounded by lifestyle changes that reflect reduced physical activity at work and during leisure. At the same time, however, poor countries continue to face food shortages and nutrient inadequacies.
Food Consumption Patterns and Trend
