Nutrition and the Benefits of Early Interventions in Diabetes, Cardiovascular and Noncommunicable Diseases

Abstract

• Changing nutrition and dietary patterns are contributing to the current global epidemic of the noncommunicable diseases that includes increasing rates of obesity, cardiovascular diseases and hypertension, and diabetes, as well as some cancers. • Other factors include changing activity patterns, genetic and early developmental factors, and an increasingly global obesogenic environment. • The burden of these diseases are increasingly shifting to poor- and emerging-economy countries so that by 2020, noncommunicable diseases will cause seven out of every ten deaths, and account for 80% of the global burden of disease in these countries while in affluent countries the burden will increasingly be borne by the socio-economically less well-off. • Many countries will therefore suffer from a double burden of malnutrition with both undernutrition and noncommunicable diseases coexisting, further straining already overtaxed health ­systems with often poor capacity. • Modifying diets is an essential part of combating these diseases – the benefits of early dietary interventions, continued throughout the life-course have a strong scientific underpinning and were recently re-enforced by WHO again for immediate national action to supplement other ­lifestyle changes and modifications of the obesogenic environment. • Facilitative changes in behaviors, policy and programs are needed at individual, national and global levels.