Intersection of public health, nutrition, and mental health: Challenges to progress

Abstract

Proper nutrition is an essential part of healthy lifestyles and well-being. However, due to its multiple causes, malnutrition has become the factor that causes the greatest burden of disease in the world. Poor nutrition due to excess consumption of critical nutrients, alcohol, tobaco, and physical inactivity constitute the four main risk factors for the development of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, respiratory, and liver diseases (Vos et al., 2015; GBD 2013 Risk Factors Collaborators, 2015; Murray et al., 2015; Gómez-Dantés et al., 2016). To date, no country has succeeded in reducing the growing prevalence of overweight and obesity that have progressively dominated the epidemiological panorama of middle and high-income countries in the past four decades (Ng et al., 2014; Barquera et al., 2020b)