Diet, Disease & Public Health Threats

Chapter 2. Diet and Disease: New and Continuing Public Health Threats

This chapter explores diet and disease around the world, emphasizing communicable diseases like obesity, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and heart disease, as well as hunger, food insecurity, micronutrient deficiencies, and infectious diseases. It highlights that hunger stems from poverty, political instability, and environmental factors, exacerbated by climate change. Undernutrition weakens immunity and increases vulnerability to infectious diseases and increased during COVID-19 due to food insecurity. Shifts towards Western diets drive overnutrition, leading to obesity and other chronic diseases. Billions face a double burden of malnutrition, where hunger and infectious diseases (overnutrition) coexist alongside obesity and preventable chronic diseases (undernutrition). The chapter discusses how unclean water and unsafe food practices increase foodborne illness and examines whether diet can prevent or cure COVID-19. It notes the Top 10 causes of death and disability worldwide—heart disease is number one—while introducing the importance of healthy, plant-based diets in preventing diet-related diseases.