Traditionally, nutrition professionals have placed great emphasis on the need to follow healthy dietary patterns, i.e. eating foods that are beneficial to health and avoiding those that are harmful. A good per diem expenses, together with other healthy lifestyles, is core topic for a long and quality life. However, estimating the quality of a per diem expenses only on the basis of the benefits for human health of consuming certain foods is no longer sufficient", said Ujué Fresán, researcher at the high school de Salud Pública de Navarra and member of the CIBER de Epidemiología del high school de Salud Carlos III, during the roundtable organised by the School de Farmacia y Nutrición on the occasion of World Food Day.

Fresán commented that human activities are pushing the Earth to the limit status : "The food system is one of the main sectors responsible for environmental degradation as well as resource use, not to mention the loss of biodiversity. Just as different foods have different impacts on our health, so too do they have different impacts on the health of the planet".

For this reason, the researcher pointed out that current consumption patterns are far from being healthy and environmentally sustainable. She therefore stressed the need to adopt healthy diets with minimal impact on the planet, promoted by nutrition professionals, "without forgetting that they have to be culturally acceptable and economical for the population to accept them".

Ujué Fresán gave the example of the University's department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, which has started a new line of research focusing on sustainable diets "in the broadest sense of the word".

Towards sustainable food to reduce world hunger

Along the same lines, Pablo Esquíroz, graduate in Pharmacy and student in Nutrition, presented his end-of-year work Degree graduate "Zero hunger, food waste and global syndemia". development He explained the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), created in 2015 to address the main global problems and, in particular, SDG-2, which seeks to end world hunger: "Recent reports published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have noted an increase in both moderate and severe food insecurity and undernutrition, thus moving away from the achievement of SDG-2, which is closely related to food waste and global syndemic (sum of two or more epidemics).

"The latter term tries to address the problem of obesity, climate change and malnutrition from a holistic, systemic viewpoint. The global syndemic has demonstrated the relationship between these three concepts, showing the need for joint action to solve the problem," he explained. "For example, in 2011, the FAO estimated that 1.3 billion tonnes of food, or one third of food production, is wasted every year. In contrast, only a quarter of these losses could alleviate world hunger.

Esquiroz concluded that in order to reduce world hunger, tackle global hunger and reduce food waste, "systematic measures are needed to tackle the problem as a whole. Serious international proposals and policies are needed, with the capacity to confront and reverse this status".