About This Talk

(source: TED.com)

Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Program, talks about why, in a world with enough food for everyone, people still go hungry, still die of starvation, still use food as a weapon of war. Her vision: “Food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person. We have to stand together.”

About The Speaker

(source: TED.com)

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, based in Rome, oversees the largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger around the globe. Every year, her program feeds more than 90 million people, including victims of war and natural disasters, families affected by HIV/AIDS, and schoolchildren in poor communities.

Sheeran believes that hunger and poverty must and can be solved through both immediate actions and long-term policies. At the Millennium Development Goal Summit last fall, she outlined 10 ways the world can end hunger. They include providing school meals, connecting small farmers to markets, empowering women and building the resiliency of vulnerable communities.

Sheeran has a long history of helping others. Prior to joining the UN in 2007, Sheeran was the Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs at the US Department of State, where she frequently focused on economic diplomacy to help emerging nations move toward self-sufficiency and prosperity. She put together several initiatives to bring US aid to the Middle East. She also served as Deputy US Trade Representative, helping African nations develop their trade capacity.

She says: “I think we can, in our lifetime, win the battle against hunger because we now have the science, technology, know-how, and the logistics to be able to meet hunger where it comes. Those pictures of children with swollen bellies will be a thing of history.”

“The era of cheap food is over. The transition to a new equilibrium is proving costlier, more prolonged and much more painful than anyone had expected. ‘We are the canary in the mine,’ says Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme.”

The Economist

I recently came across this article that was featured in Nature’s journal “Obesity” and also on Reuters. It’s promising research on a new scale known as the “Body Adipose Index” or BAI. It’s no mystery that the widely accepted Body Mass Index (BMI) is flawed in its’ attempt to correlate with healthy risk factors. We need a more accurate tool…so could BAI be the new BMI?

Original Article

By: Reuters

The new measure, called the Body Adiposity Index, or BAI, relies on height and hip measurements, and it is meant to offer a more flexible alternative to body mass index, or BMI, a ratio of height and weight, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

BMI has been used to measure body fat for the past 200 years, but it is not without flaws, Richard Bergman of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and colleagues wrote in the journal Obesity.

While there are other, more complex ways to measure body fat beyond simply stepping on a scale, BMI is widely used both by researchers and doctors.

It is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in meters squared. A person who is 5 feet 5 inches tall is classified as overweight at 150 pounds (68 kg) and obese at 180 pounds (82 kg).

But there is a lot of wiggle room in that calculation.

For example, women and men with the same BMI might have very different levels of extra flab. BMI numbers cannot be generalized across different ethnic groups or used with athletes, who have extra lean body mass.

The team made the index using data from a Mexican-American population study. They confirmed the scale’s accuracy using an advanced device called a dual-energy X-ray absorption or DEXA scanner. Tests in a study of African Americans showed similar findings, suggesting BAI can be used across different racial groups.

BAI is a complex ratio of hip circumference to height that can be calculated by doctors or nurses with a computer or calculator.

The team says BAI still needs some fine tuning, and they still need to test it among whites and other ethnic groups, but they think it has promise as new tool, especially in remote settings with limited access to reliable scales.

“After further validation, this measure can be proposed as a useful measure of percent fat, which is very easy to obtain. However, it remains to be seen if the BAI is a more useful predictor of health outcome, in both males and females, than other indexes of body adiposity, including the BMI itself,” the team wrote.

Obesity has become a global epidemic, with more than half a billion people, or one in 10 adults worldwide, considered to be obese – more than double the number in 1980. Obesity-related diseases account for nearly 10 percent of U.S. medical spending, or an estimated $147 billion a year.

First published at Masters In Public Health

By: Paul Hench

myrecipes.com

Article first published as Teaching Children Nutrition: A Resource Guide on Technorati.

By: Ali Al-Rajhi, head editor

Parents want the best for their children. The BEST education…the BEST clothes…the BEST toys. But, there is one area that parents may neglect – nutrition! It’s never a parents intention to neglect proper nutrition, but it’s a common trend to overlook the long term importance of establishing solid nutritional habits for their children; and even for parents themselves as they must lead by example.

This is an area that I am passionate about for my family and friends. I’ve compiled a couple of useful tools that are helpful to teach nutrition. Keep in mind, that it’s a family effort and strive for PROGRESS, not PERFECTION.

1) Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Campaign

Why? Jamie Oliver presents the issues that should concern every parent in the U.S. caused by our obesogenic environment (e.g., rising rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, etc). His website is filled with tips on how to start a community campaign to address local food systems such as school cafeterias, how to educate kids on where their food comes from, and tips for families to get in the kitchen and cook with their kids. Check out the video on his site! Also, HERE is a quick guide to his Food Revolution.

2) The ABC’s of Nutrition

The name says it all.

3) Nourish Interactive’s Guide to Reading Food Labels

Knowing what your food is made of can be very powerful in making healthy food choices. The guide helps to “demystify” the food label for children.

4) Final thoughts

Most importantly, teaching your kids how to prepare and cook meals is the most powerful way to establish the important of a nutritionally sound lifestyle. All that children learn will assimilate nicely when experience the joy of cooking!

Again, strive for PROGRESS…not PERFECTION!

Article first published as The Paleo Lifestyle: Living and Playing Like Cavemen on Technorati.

source: flickr.com/photos/lord-jim/2245362817/

By: Ali Al-Rajhi, head editor

I have started to adapt to a more Paleolithic lifestyle after reading Arthur De Vany’s book “The New Evolution Diet”and Mark Sission’s book “The Primal Blueprint,” I have found that it’s a much more natural lifestyle that our bodies may have been better suited for. The following were some question I asked myself when I began to learn more about the Paleo lifestyle.

1. What is Paleo?

In the simplest terms it’s adapting to a lifestyle (primarily our diet & physical activity) to best suite what your body was intended to do in terms of genetics. The best examples of how such a life was lived are derived from how our Paleolithic ancestors lived.

2. What is the Paleolithic Diet (or Paleo Diet)?

A diet “based on the simple understanding that the best human diet is the one to which we are best genetically adapted” (thepaleodiet.com). In essence, consuming whole fruits and vegetables, lean protein (lean meat, chicken, fish), avoiding processed foods and grains. This is analogus to the fact that our Paleo cousins consuming what was in their environment (e.g., hunting wild game, fishing, consuming berries, etc) and avoiding what they did not with the logic that our genetic makeup has not changed significantly from our Paleo cousins.

A book I recently read by Dr. Arthur De Vany – author of “The New Evolution Diet” and a prime example of how the Paleo lifestyle can be beneficial – makes a very important point: It is difficult for the average person to live exactly like our Paleo cousins, instead we should try to mimic our diets to what was consumed (a diet high in protein and whole fruits & veggies) by adapting to what is already in our environment. For example, shopping only the periphery of the super-market (meats, fruits, veggies) and avoiding the center isles (processed foods, cereals, breads, etc), except for certain nuts which are rich in protein and healthy fats.