"Traditionally, nutrition professionals have placed great emphasis on the need to follow healthy dietary patterns, that is, to consume foods that bring health benefits and avoid 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 Institute of Public Health of Navarra and member of the CIBER of Epidemiology of the Carlos III Health Institute, during the roundtable organized by the School of Pharmacy and Nutrition 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 sustainable, environmentally speaking. For this reason, she stressed the need to adopt healthy diets with a minimum impact on the planet, promoted by nutrition professionals, "without forgetting that they must be culturally acceptable and economical for the population to accept them".

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

Towards sustainable food to reduce world hunger

In the same vein, Pablo Esquíroz, graduate in Pharmacy and student in Nutrition, presented his work end of Degree graduate "Zero hunger, food waste and global syndemia". He outlined the Sustainable development Goals (SDGs), created in 2015 to address major global issues, and specifically SDG-2, which seeks to end world hunger: "Recent reports published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have shown an increase in both moderate and severe food insecurity and malnutrition, 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 comprehensive, systemic view. The global syndemic has demonstrated the relationship between these three concepts, evidencing the need for joint action to solve the problem," he explained. "For example, in 2011 the FAO estimated that 1.3 billion tons of food, or one third of production, is wasted at the end of the year. In contrast, just a quarter of these losses could alleviate hunger in the world."

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