The Covid 19 Pandemic And Food Consumption Patterns

Available online: https://pub.norden.org/temanord2021-540/ Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, consumer eating patterns and habits have changed. Before the pandemic, most countries in the Nordic-Baltic region had been collecting food consumption data to monitor the region’s health and food safety situation, but during these unusual times, no data on consumer behaviour exists. It’s important to examine changes in food consumption in the Nordic-Baltic region during the pandemic not only to understand the local situation and trends but also global trends and their effect on food supply chains, regional food availability, and food waste. Comparing regional data with those in Asia, the USA, and elsewhere offers the opportunity to see which practices are effective in each region and provides more information to help predict trends in consumer behaviour during the post-pandemic recovery period.

The COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak has affected populations across the world. In a short time we were exposed to a critical situation, faced with numerous medical, social and economic challenges. While the medical community has focused on developing successful diagnostic and medical treatments, many countries.

Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.

All aspects of feeding and nourishing people: growing, harvesting, packaging, processing, transporting, marketing, and consuming food are part of the food system. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, food systems faced many challenges such as hunger increases, which affected up to 811 million people as of 2020, while healthy diets were unaffordable for at least 3 billion people. More than 80% of the population affected by hunger and 95% of people unable to afford a healthy diet were found in Asia and Africa. Transformation of the global food system is clearly needed if we wish to embed equity, sustainability, and health as priorities in food provision and consumption. Some of these transformations will be facilitated through new technologies, while others will require public policy shifts, changes in the private agro-food industry, actions by civil society, and behavioral changes by individuals. In this dynamic context, technology actors and the consumers they serve sit at an important nexus within the food system, and have the potential to make decisions that cut across the challenges and opportunities to improve sustainable food system outcomes. Although food security has improved in developed countries, many countries, particularly low- to middle-income countries (LMIC), suffer from significant food insecurity challenges. In addition, food production, accessibility, and availability have been further impacted due to the COVID-19 outbreak, causing growing global concerns regarding food security, especially within the most vulnerable communities. Moreover, the transformation of food systems for addressing healthy nutrition, food insecurity, and public health issues is a global concern. Food security and nutrition systems are directly related to human well-being and global stability, particularly in a time when diets transition toward increased reliance upon processed foods, increased fast-food intake, high consumption of edible oils, and sugar-sweetened beverages, lack of physical activities, and increased lifestyles worldwide. These changes in lifestyle continue to contribute to the growing pandemic of non-communicable diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases are clearly noticed across the globe. The study of nutrition systems, food security, and the roles of technological advances, especially in LMIC, is considered the major factor in understanding food transition and population health. Physical inactivity threatens LMIC public health as it is a prime behavioral risk factor associated with major non-communicable diseases such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and breast and colon cancer. Its long-term impacts increasingly burden national economies. Decreasing its prevalence is paramount toward decreasing premature mortality and restoring healthy populations. In its most recent iteration of a global action plan for the prevention of non-communicable diseases, the World Health Organization established voluntary global targets to reduce physical inactivity by 10%. Currently, limited published systematic analysis of physical inactivity prevalence among Muslim-majority countries exists. Existing literature is concentrated on Arab countries, which represent less than half of all Muslim nations. To date, however, pan-Islamic physical inactivity data have not been reported. Doing so can potentially galvanize religion-specific agencies (e.g., Islamic Relief Worldwide, Organization of Islamic Cooperation) to support efforts aimed at decreasing physical inactivity.

The Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences under contract from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was charged to study the sources of data on food consumption and to suggest a system for integrating these data with data on nutrition and health status.

In early June 2020, we called by telephone a representative sample of nearly 600 households in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to assess income changes and household food and nutrition security status during the COVID-19 pandemic (survey period covering May). This was the second administration of a COVID-19 related survey to these households, following an initial survey conducted in early May 2020 covering the situation of the survey households in April. More than two-third of the households indicated in the second survey that their incomes were lower than expected (up from 58 percent in April) and 45 percent reported that they are extremely stressed about the situation (up from 35 percent in April). Using a pre-pandemic wealth index, we find that less-wealthy households were considerably more likely to report income losses and high stress levels than were wealthier households. Compared to a period just before the pandemic (January and February 2020), indicators measuring food security have significantly worsened but have remained the same since April. During the pandemic, households are less and less frequently consuming relatively more expensive but nutritionally richer foods, such as fruit and dairy products. However, overall food security status in Addis Ababa is not yet alarming, possibly because many households have been able to use their savings to buffer food consumption. As the pandemic is still in an early stage in Ethiopia, it is likely that these savings will not last throughout the pandemic, calling for a rapid scale-up of existing support programs.