6 ms·

Three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet

53 points by tchalla 5y ago

galoisgirl 5y ago
Good thing they can afford great healthcare then.
yorwba 5y ago
It's interesting that, if you sort the table view https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-healthy-diet-unaffordable?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-healthy-diet-unaffo... by ascending share of the population that cannot afford a healthy diet, the five countries that come out ahead are: Azerbaijan 0.00% Uzbekistan 0.00% Iceland 0.02% Slovenia 0.02% Switzerland 0.02% I'm quite surprised to see Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan with both 0.00%. I wonder whether that's an artifact of their estimation process (maybe they didn't have precise information on the bottom end of the income distribution?) or whether there's something those countries are doing much better than everyone else.
bserge 5y ago
Is it possible to fix this? I am from a poor eastern European country and I'm donating to orphanages and animal shelters. By western standards they need very little money. You can spend $5 on a coffee or on feeding a child for 2 days or clothing them for months. Or on keeping several dogs fed for the same amount of time and under a roof. Of course, more is better. The average donation to an orphanage in the country is $1.5 and I'm not sure how much they manage to get in a month. Transferring money is not a problem, it's organization. But to even try and change anything one would have to go through the government, which seems completely uninterested in it. Hell, they won't even buy new buses around the capital. But politicians get new Skodas and Mercs. Big charity organizations are randomly delivering a bunch of food or clothing every few months. Which is great, but it's not a regular, nor that much of a supply. Direct crowdfunding from richer regions would work much better, but again, how to organize it? I guess that's why charities spend so much on just operating, it's harder than it seems. Yet all the gig economy companies show that it may be possible to leverage modern IT technology for it.
Diggsey 5y ago
How on earth does the US have 3.25 million people who can't afford a calorie sufficient diet? If there's one thing you can get on the cheap in the US, it's calories.
brtknr 5y ago
The other 3 billion can but would rather eat unhealthily.
- BlissWaves 5y ago
  The remaining 1.6 billion can but would rather not eat at all.
NonContro 5y ago
Sir Peter Scott, Founder, WWF (1909-1989) “You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF's money on buying condoms.” We'll do more for the planet and for humanity by making female access to education, contraception, and abortion universal. Either that, or Gaia will control the population, and it won't be pleasant.
- immmmmm 5y ago
  population is less of an issue than extreme wealth gap that allows some guys to see the world burning from above Karman line. but yeah we already have massive crop failures in switzerland.
- fredley 5y ago
  This is the truth nobody will really talk about. Climate change is rooted in the size of the global human population more than anything else. Reducing our emissions buys us a bit of time, but it's just kicking the can down the road; as long as the global population continues to increase, we'll always catch up with it again. Earth can only support a certain number of human beings.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    >Earth can only support a certain number of human beings. Correction. Earth can only support a certain number of human beings at a given standard of life. I have seen HN comments where some users have said that earths capacity is closer to 100 billion than 10 billion but they always ignore that the standard of living would have to be pretty terrible.
    - rocknor 5y ago
      > Earth can only support a certain number of human beings at a given standard of life. Correction, to be pedantic. Earth can only support a certain number of human beings at a given standard of life with our current sciencific advancement. The number increases with advancements in renewable tech.
unpolloloco 5y ago
I'd be curious how this number has changed over time. I'd suspect that (as a percentage of overall population) this number is the lowest it's ever been in human history. Still something to continue improving!
uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
Covid was just the gasolin on a global health crisis. https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/39/3/472 https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/39/3/472 Diabetes is one of the major risk factors for dangerous disease.
baxtr 5y ago
I have an observation to share: Many countries where almost no one can afford a healthy diet according to this sites also have high population growth rates. For example, almost 96% of all people in Congo don't have enough money for healthy food, but the yearly growth rate is 3% or so. Do you think this is correlated? And if so, isn't this then a vicious cycle? EDIT: I'd really love to see an open discussion on this topic without a flame war or anything.
- NonContro 5y ago
  IQ is negatively correlated to fertility: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972320 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972320 The average IQ of the Congo population has been measured between 64-74: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1063.3595&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10... The fertility rate is 5.82: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=CD https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... Population of the DRC: 1950: 12m 2000: 47m 2050: 194m 2100: 362m https://www.populationpyramid.net/democratic-republic-of-the-congo/2100/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/democratic-republic-of-the...
  - tryingtogetback 5y ago
    Not sure why you are being downvoted. It's at very least plausible. The reasons for much lower birth rates in western (and westernized) cultures are education, security, and stability. Remove these and your primitive instincts like reproduction will start to dominate your life again (baby boomers as an example in US).
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      Somewhat true but there are also economic pressures on reproduction. Though I suppose you need some basic education to think that far ahead
- sandworm101 5y ago
  A different definition of health. Darwin would certainly call thier diet healthy enough. Any expanding population is at an evolutionary level more sucessfull than a stagnant population. Life expectancy, our modern concpet of health, is a very different story.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
As far as I am aware, there isn't much of a consensus among nutritionists as to what constitutes a "healthy diet", other than that a lot of sugar really isn't it. The article seems to define the term based on regional norms, which seems weird to me. No doubt a lot of people are not getting much variety in their food, yet somehow I doubt 3B people would be considered "unhealthy" in that they are so deficient in some mineral or fat that they experience functional maladies.
- mfer 5y ago
  There is a lot more concensus and knowledge (science based) than people think. The news isn't good at reporting it. Dr. Michael Greger does a pretty good job at explaining things. He recently did a video on the scientific consensus for a healthy diet. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-scientific-consensus-on-a-healthy-diet/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-scientific-consensus-on.... It's designed for the masses but based on the research. Explanations and access to the research are much more accessible now than 20 years ago.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Is there a transcript or summary available? I personally detest video as a source of information.
    - mfer 5y ago
      I'm not entirely sure if there is a summary of the video. The final gist is that a minimally processed plant based diet is the healthiest. This is the consensus and what the cohort studies repeatedly show. There are now doctors/scientists who can explain the biomechanics of it all, too.
      - krageon 5y ago
        Last time the consensus was that "blue" (vegetables, fish, rice, few red and white meats) diet countries have the best quality of life and expected lifespan. If there really has been a major shift in this insight towards "plant based, little processing" then that goes a little beyond "the news is not good at reporting it" and goes straight into "everyone needs to have missed this". That honestly doesn't seem likely.
aaron695 5y ago
This really matters in the womb until 2 years. This is when you do brain damage. It will be in all those 3 billion unless they have had access to supplements until 2 years. You are talking bringing high IQ's down to average and average IQ's down to below average. Below average to disabled. This continues the cycle. There's little reason to improving schools and giving them computers until you fix this.
nix23 5y ago
>>Healthy diets are expensive That's absolutely NOT true!
- krageon 5y ago
  Have you tried to compare a mostly rice diet to something that has quite significant variety in it (especially if you need the volume of food that a plant-based diet requires)? It's very expensive.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Just because everyone thinks rice/corn/potato is the problem-solver...hint it's not.
    - krageon 5y ago
      The claim was that healthy diets are not expensive, when in reality they are. The fact that unhealthy diets are unhealthy is not in dispute.
      - nix23 5y ago
        >>On average, the healthier diet costs 69% more, but this estimate is greatly affected by food choices. For a family whose household income is exceeded by one-third of the population, this increased expenditure represents about 30% of total household income. This could be decreased to about 10% to 15% if a healthy diet is carefully designed. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47790404_The_cost_of_a_healthy_diet_A_South_African_perspective https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47790404_The_cost_o...
        krageon 5y ago
        "For a family whose household income is exceeded by one-third of the population", in other words "rich". Yes, it's only 30% household income in extra spending! And perhaps with a lot of effort it can be lowered to 10-15% extra spending. This is a lot, especially when you don't have such an enormous amount of leeway in money that you can just move somewhere else.
senojsitruc 5y ago
*healthful
GaryTang 5y ago
eating healthy is cheaper in my experience

53 points by tchalla 5y ago

Good thing they can afford great healthcare then.

It's interesting that, if you sort the table view https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-healthy-diet-unaffordable?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-healthy-diet-unaffo... by ascending share of the population that cannot afford a healthy diet, the five countries that come out ahead are: Azerbaijan 0.00% Uzbekistan 0.00% Iceland 0.02% Slovenia 0.02% Switzerland 0.02% I'm quite surprised to see Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan with both 0.00%. I wonder whether that's an artifact of their estimation process (maybe they didn't have precise information on the bottom end of the income distribution?) or whether there's something those countries are doing much better than everyone else.

bserge 5y ago

Is it possible to fix this? I am from a poor eastern European country and I'm donating to orphanages and animal shelters. By western standards they need very little money. You can spend $5 on a coffee or on feeding a child for 2 days or clothing them for months. Or on keeping several dogs fed for the same amount of time and under a roof. Of course, more is better. The average donation to an orphanage in the country is $1.5 and I'm not sure how much they manage to get in a month. Transferring money is not a problem, it's organization. But to even try and change anything one would have to go through the government, which seems completely uninterested in it. Hell, they won't even buy new buses around the capital. But politicians get new Skodas and Mercs. Big charity organizations are randomly delivering a bunch of food or clothing every few months. Which is great, but it's not a regular, nor that much of a supply. Direct crowdfunding from richer regions would work much better, but again, how to organize it? I guess that's why charities spend so much on just operating, it's harder than it seems. Yet all the gig economy companies show that it may be possible to leverage modern IT technology for it.

Diggsey 5y ago

How on earth does the US have 3.25 million people who can't afford a calorie sufficient diet? If there's one thing you can get on the cheap in the US, it's calories.

brtknr 5y ago

The other 3 billion can but would rather eat unhealthily.

BlissWaves 5y ago
The remaining 1.6 billion can but would rather not eat at all.

NonContro 5y ago

Sir Peter Scott, Founder, WWF (1909-1989) “You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF's money on buying condoms.” We'll do more for the planet and for humanity by making female access to education, contraception, and abortion universal. Either that, or Gaia will control the population, and it won't be pleasant.

immmmmm 5y ago
population is less of an issue than extreme wealth gap that allows some guys to see the world burning from above Karman line. but yeah we already have massive crop failures in switzerland.
fredley 5y ago
This is the truth nobody will really talk about. Climate change is rooted in the size of the global human population more than anything else. Reducing our emissions buys us a bit of time, but it's just kicking the can down the road; as long as the global population continues to increase, we'll always catch up with it again. Earth can only support a certain number of human beings.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >Earth can only support a certain number of human beings. Correction. Earth can only support a certain number of human beings at a given standard of life. I have seen HN comments where some users have said that earths capacity is closer to 100 billion than 10 billion but they always ignore that the standard of living would have to be pretty terrible.
  - rocknor 5y ago
    > Earth can only support a certain number of human beings at a given standard of life. Correction, to be pedantic. Earth can only support a certain number of human beings at a given standard of life with our current sciencific advancement. The number increases with advancements in renewable tech.

unpolloloco 5y ago

I'd be curious how this number has changed over time. I'd suspect that (as a percentage of overall population) this number is the lowest it's ever been in human history. Still something to continue improving!

uCantCauseUCant 5y ago

Covid was just the gasolin on a global health crisis. https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/39/3/472 https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/39/3/472 Diabetes is one of the major risk factors for dangerous disease.

baxtr 5y ago

I have an observation to share: Many countries where almost no one can afford a healthy diet according to this sites also have high population growth rates. For example, almost 96% of all people in Congo don't have enough money for healthy food, but the yearly growth rate is 3% or so. Do you think this is correlated? And if so, isn't this then a vicious cycle? EDIT: I'd really love to see an open discussion on this topic without a flame war or anything.

NonContro 5y ago
IQ is negatively correlated to fertility: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972320 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1972320 The average IQ of the Congo population has been measured between 64-74: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1063.3595&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10... The fertility rate is 5.82: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=CD https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... Population of the DRC: 1950: 12m 2000: 47m 2050: 194m 2100: 362m https://www.populationpyramid.net/democratic-republic-of-the-congo/2100/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/democratic-republic-of-the...
- tryingtogetback 5y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted. It's at very least plausible. The reasons for much lower birth rates in western (and westernized) cultures are education, security, and stability. Remove these and your primitive instincts like reproduction will start to dominate your life again (baby boomers as an example in US).
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Somewhat true but there are also economic pressures on reproduction. Though I suppose you need some basic education to think that far ahead
sandworm101 5y ago
A different definition of health. Darwin would certainly call thier diet healthy enough. Any expanding population is at an evolutionary level more sucessfull than a stagnant population. Life expectancy, our modern concpet of health, is a very different story.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

As far as I am aware, there isn't much of a consensus among nutritionists as to what constitutes a "healthy diet", other than that a lot of sugar really isn't it. The article seems to define the term based on regional norms, which seems weird to me. No doubt a lot of people are not getting much variety in their food, yet somehow I doubt 3B people would be considered "unhealthy" in that they are so deficient in some mineral or fat that they experience functional maladies.

mfer 5y ago
There is a lot more concensus and knowledge (science based) than people think. The news isn't good at reporting it. Dr. Michael Greger does a pretty good job at explaining things. He recently did a video on the scientific consensus for a healthy diet. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-scientific-consensus-on-a-healthy-diet/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-scientific-consensus-on.... It's designed for the masses but based on the research. Explanations and access to the research are much more accessible now than 20 years ago.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Is there a transcript or summary available? I personally detest video as a source of information.
  - mfer 5y ago
    I'm not entirely sure if there is a summary of the video. The final gist is that a minimally processed plant based diet is the healthiest. This is the consensus and what the cohort studies repeatedly show. There are now doctors/scientists who can explain the biomechanics of it all, too.
    - krageon 5y ago
      Last time the consensus was that "blue" (vegetables, fish, rice, few red and white meats) diet countries have the best quality of life and expected lifespan. If there really has been a major shift in this insight towards "plant based, little processing" then that goes a little beyond "the news is not good at reporting it" and goes straight into "everyone needs to have missed this". That honestly doesn't seem likely.

aaron695 5y ago

This really matters in the womb until 2 years. This is when you do brain damage. It will be in all those 3 billion unless they have had access to supplements until 2 years. You are talking bringing high IQ's down to average and average IQ's down to below average. Below average to disabled. This continues the cycle. There's little reason to improving schools and giving them computers until you fix this.

nix23 5y ago

>>Healthy diets are expensive That's absolutely NOT true!

krageon 5y ago
Have you tried to compare a mostly rice diet to something that has quite significant variety in it (especially if you need the volume of food that a plant-based diet requires)? It's very expensive.
- nix23 5y ago
  Just because everyone thinks rice/corn/potato is the problem-solver...hint it's not.
  - krageon 5y ago
    The claim was that healthy diets are not expensive, when in reality they are. The fact that unhealthy diets are unhealthy is not in dispute.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >>On average, the healthier diet costs 69% more, but this estimate is greatly affected by food choices. For a family whose household income is exceeded by one-third of the population, this increased expenditure represents about 30% of total household income. This could be decreased to about 10% to 15% if a healthy diet is carefully designed. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47790404_The_cost_of_a_healthy_diet_A_South_African_perspective https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47790404_The_cost_o...
      - krageon 5y ago
        "For a family whose household income is exceeded by one-third of the population", in other words "rich". Yes, it's only 30% household income in extra spending! And perhaps with a lot of effort it can be lowered to 10-15% extra spending. This is a lot, especially when you don't have such an enormous amount of leeway in money that you can just move somewhere else.

senojsitruc 5y ago

*healthful

GaryTang 5y ago

eating healthy is cheaper in my experience