Nutritional transition, from shortage to excess: Where is the balance?

Nutritional Transition (NT) refers to the series of changes in eating habits and lifestyle. Over the past 50 years we have witnessed the last Nutritional Transition in human populations. Depending on the degree of development or geographical location of different countries we find different stages of transition. This change in eating habits and lifestyles is linked to an improvement in the socioeconomic and health conditions (demographic transition and epidemiological transition). In general we can say that its consequences in more privileged populations came in two consecutive stages: during the first shortage situations which affected development were controlled, while in the second stage, which is still happening, there was an effect on overweight and obesity, and on other chronic diseases linked to old age (though not exclusively) like cardiovascular diseases or diabetes mellitus type II.

In poorer regions in an NT process, there are malnutrition problems due to shortage and excess (a double burden of disease) in the same country (socioeconomic and geographical differences, etc.), in same family (differences by age group and/or sex) and in the same person (excess weight and vitamin or mineral deficiencies).

At a street stall in a city in Ecuador, a family group —grandmother, daughter and granddaughter— sells potatoes, beans and bananas from the family plot. Ecuador is the second producer of bananas in the world, and the banana is a basic food in the country.

Pilar Montero, expert in Nutrition, Professor at the Biology department at UAM and spokesperson for the Association for the Study of Human vocal Ecology