Nutrition In Crisis

Almost every day it seems a new study is published that shows you are at risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or death due to something you’ve just eaten for lunch. Many of us no longer know what to eat or who to believe. In Nutrition in Crisis distinguished biochemist Richard Feinman, PhD, cuts through the noise, explaining the intricacies of nutrition and human metabolism in accessible terms. He lays out the tools you need to navigate the current confusion in medical literature and its increasingly bizarre reflection in the media. At the same time, Nutrition in Crisis offers an unsparing critique of the nutritional establishment, which continues to demonize fat and refute the benefits of low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets—all despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Feinman tells the story of the first low-carbohydrate revolution fifteen years ago, how it began, what killed it, and why a second revolution is now reaching a fever pitch. He exposes the backhanded tactics of a regressive nutritional establishment that ignores good data and common sense, and highlights the innovative work of those researchers who have broken rank. Entertaining, informative, and irreverent, Feinman paints a broad picture of the nutrition world: the beauty of the underlying biochemistry; the embarrassing failures of the medical establishment; the preeminence of low-carbohydrate diets for weight loss, diabetes, other metabolic diseases, and even cancer; and what’s wrong with the constant reports that the foods we’ve been eating for centuries represent a threat rather than a source of pleasure.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER What happens when you eat an apple? The answer is vastly more complex than you imagine. Every apple contains thousands of antioxidants whose names, beyond a few like vitamin C, are unfamiliar to us, and each of these powerful chemicals has the potential to play an important role in supporting our health. They impact thousands upon thousands of metabolic reactions inside the human body. But calculating the specific influence of each of these chemicals isn't nearly sufficient to explain the effect of the apple as a whole. Because almost every chemical can affect every other chemical, there is an almost infinite number of possible biological consequences. And that's just from an apple. Nutritional science, long stuck in a reductionist mindset, is at the cusp of a revolution. The traditional “gold standard" of nutrition research has been to study one chemical at a time in an attempt to determine its particular impact on the human body. These sorts of studies are helpful to food companies trying to prove there is a chemical in milk or pre-packaged dinners that is “good" for us, but they provide little insight into the complexity of what actually happens in our bodies or how those chemicals contribute to our health. In The China Study, T. Colin Campbell (alongside his son, Thomas M. Campbell) revolutionized the way we think about our food with the evidence that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat. Now, in Whole, he explains the science behind that evidence, the ways our current scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity of the human body, and why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that everything we think we know about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits haven't changed. Whole is an eye-opening, paradigm-changing journey through cutting-edge thinking on nutrition, a scientific tour de force with powerful implications for our health and for our world.

In 2007 and 2008, the world witnessed a dramatic increase in food prices. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 compounded the burden of high food prices, exacerbating the problems of hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. The tandem food price and economic crises struck amidst the massive, chronic problem of hunger and undernutrition in developing countries. National governments and international actors have taken a variety of steps to mitigate the negative effects of increased food prices on particular groups. The recent abrupt increase in food prices, in tandem with the current global economic crisis, threatens progress already made in these areas, and could inhibit future efforts. The Institute of Medicine held a workshop, summarized in this volume, to describe the dynamic technological, agricultural, and economic issues contributing to the food price increases of 2007 and 2008 and their impacts on health and nutrition in resource-poor regions. The compounding effects of the current global economic downturn on nutrition motivated additional discussions on these dual crises, their impacts on the nutritional status of vulnerable populations, and opportunities to mitigate their negative nutritional effects.

The COVID-19 crisis in Myanmar poses a very serious risk to the nutritional status of vulnerable populations, notably women and children, as well as poor urban populations and internally displaced persons. The COVID-19 crisis will hit vulnerable groups through multiple mechanisms.

Two years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health, economic, and social disruptions caused by this global crisis continue to evolve. The impacts of the pandemic are likely to endure for years to come, with poor, marginalized, and vulnerable groups the most affected. In COVID-19 & Global Food Security: Two Years Later, the editors bring together contributions from new IFPRI research, blogs, and the CGIAR COVID-19 Hub to examine the pandemic’s effects on poverty, food security, nutrition, and health around the world. This volume presents key lessons learned on food security and food system resilience in 2020 and 2021 and assesses the effectiveness of policy responses to the crisis. Looking forward, the authors consider how the pandemic experience can inform both recovery and longer-term efforts to build more resilient food systems.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is one of the most controversial forms of social welfare in the United States. Although it’s commonly believed that such federal programs have been cut back since the 1980s, Maggie Dickinson charts the dramatic expansion and reformulation of the food safety net in the twenty-first century. Today, receiving SNAP benefits is often tied to work requirements, which essentially subsidizes low-wage jobs. Excluded populations—such as the unemployed, informally employed workers, and undocumented immigrants—must rely on charity to survive. Feeding the Crisis tells the story of eight families as they navigate the terrain of an expanding network of food assistance programs in which care and abandonment work hand in hand to regulate people on the social and economic margins. Amid calls at the federal level to expand work requirements for food assistance, Dickinson shows us how such ideas are bad policy that fail to adequately address hunger in America. Feeding the Crisis brings the voices of food-insecure families into national debates about welfare policy, offering fresh insights into how we can establish a right to food in the United States.

Every year, natural disasters, armed conflicts and other forms of crisis adversely affect the lives of millions of people in the developing world. In many countries, families are forced to abandon their homes, farms and villages; access to adequate food becomes difficult, and hardship contributes to high rates of malnutrition. This book offers guidance to program planners and technicians in the fields of nutrition, food security, agriculture and community development in adopting a longer-term perspective to addressing problems of household food insecurity and malnutrition during periods of crisis and recovery. It provides a framework for an implementation strategy that focuses on both saving lives in the short term and strengthening livelihood to ensure that households are less vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity in the future.