WHO scientist urges Centre to heavily tax high fat, sugar, salt products

Delivering a lecture at MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) here, she dwelt on the “Double Burden of Malnutrition” or “The New Nutrition Reality” in her talk.

“The co-existence of overweight and obesity along with stunting is the new nutrition reality that we need to address urgently’’, she added.

‘’We always think that undernutrition and deficiencies are problems of low-income countries and overweight and obesity are the problems of the high-income countries. But the new reality is these two coexist in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) countries, communities and also in households globally,’’ she said.

Pointing out to data on malnutrition, Dr Sowmya said about 2.3 billion adults and children were overweight globally, with about 150 million stunted children.

“The burden of overweight and obesity is growing rapidly and the rate of undernutrition is coming down”, she said. She also cautioned that this would have long-term consequences and could affect future generations.

With increasing exposure to ultra-processed foods, even among poorest families, she said these were cheaper and more easily available than healthy food, which was a concern.

While this was a difficult process, taxing unhealthy food or making nutrition information labelling mandatory, could help, she said.

Listing the 10 ‘double duty actions’ identified by the LANCET commission, Dr Soumya also called for systematic assessment of ICDS and PDS programmes from the perspective of nutrition.

Listing a set of eight policy recommendations for India, she called for strengthening data systems, nutrition surveillance and surveys, decentralised planning and policies focussing on local consumption of diverse diets, cultivation of biofortified plants, besides nutrition awareness.