The spread of Western eating habits around the world is bad for human health and for the environment. These findings came from a new report in the journal Nature. A professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota has examined information from about 100 countries. He wants to identify what food people eat and how diet affected their overall health.
Mr. David Tillman has observed a movement beginning in the 1960s wherein nations were beginning to be industrialized and the population increased. Of course, the diet of the people changed too and long after, they had embraced the Western diet.
The Western diet consists of foods high in refined or processed sugar, fat, oil and even meat. As more and more people consume these foods, more fell into the category of obesity and many became sick. Since these foods are very high in calories, people began gaining weight because they do not exercise.
"The excess, let us say, in the 15 richest nations of the world, right now is on the order of about 400 or 500 extra calories a day that are eaten beyond what people need, and that leads people to gain weight," Mr. Tillman said. He added that overweight or obese people are more prone to developing diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and even some cancers.
"Diabetes is shooting to very high rates in the United States and across Europe. Heart disease is a major cause of mortality in the Western countries. Unfortunately when people become industrialized, if they adopt this Western diet, they are going to have these same health impacts, and in some cases if you are Asian, you have them more severely than even happens in the West," Mr. Tillman reiterated and he stated that China is a country where the number of people living with diabetes have drastically increased.
A diet that is bad for the health can also be bad for the environment. If the population has a greater demand for food, experts say that forests and other tropical areas will be converted into farmlands to grow plants and poultry to supply the demand.
"We are likely to have more greenhouse gas released in the future from agriculture because of this dietary shift than all the greenhouse gas that right now comes out of all the cars, and all of the airplanes, boats and ships, all forms of transportation. So our change in diet is likely to be worse for the world for climate warming than all the transportation sources we use right now," He concluded.
