Most countries in the world are facing a serious
public health problem as a result of malnutrition, a report warns.
The Global
Nutrition Report said every nation except China had crossed a
"malnutrition red line", suffering from too much or too little
nutrition.
Globally, malnutrition led to "11% of GDP being
squandered as a result of lives lost, less learning, less earning and days lost
to illness," it added.
The findings follow on from last year's Nutrition from Growth summit in
London.
At the 2013 gathering, 96 signatories made
"significant and public commitments to nutrition-related actions" and
this report was an assessment of the work that still needed to be done and the
progress made.
"Malnutrition is an invisible thing, unless it
is very extreme," explained Lawrence Haddad, co-chairman of the
independent expert group that compiled the report.
"This invisibility stops action happening but
it does not stop bad things happening to the children, " he told BBC News.
"It does not stop preventing the children's
brains from developing; it does not stop their immune systems from not
developing.
"It is a silent crisis and we are trying to
raise the awareness of the extent of malnutrition and the damage it does."
The UN World Food Program estimates that poor
nutrition causes nearly half of deaths in children aged under five - 3.1
million children each year.
Dr Haddad, a senior research fellow for the
International Food Policy Research Institute, highlighted three areas that the
report focused on.
"The first thing we did was to say that we were
not just going to focus on under nutrition, which is
closely related to hunger, but
also over nutrition and obesity," he explained. "Malnutrition just
means bad nutrition."
The second thing we did was focus on not just the
outcomes, we also focused on the drivers. We looked at underlying factors, such
as sanitation, water quality, food security, spending on nutrition and women's
status.
"The third thing we did was to look at a very
specific set of commitments that were made in the 2013 summit that David
Cameron hosted in London."
The expert group's assessment on global nutrition
drew a number of conclusions.
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