Hunger games

[Young Master Smeet]

Aware that I occasionally use out of date stats, I spent a while looking for deaths by hunger a couple of years ago, and can attest that, as this article suggests:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22935692

The internet is littered with horrific sounding figures.

Quote:

This latest, the 10-second one, is based on a figure from a very reputable source – The Lancet, an internationally renowned journal which recently published a paper saying that more than three million children died of undernutrition in 2011.

As the article points out, that doesn't mean 3 million starved, but fell prey to disease as a consequence of malnutrition.

Quote:

"Certainly the poorest have the greatest problems with undernutrition, but even then there might be sufficient food to feed children. The difficulty is achieving a high enough quality diet – a diet that is dominated by cereals or starches would not be a high enough quality diet to achieve the nutrition that's needed in the first two years of life."

In most cases, the problem could be resolved through nutrition education, Black says.

In some cultures, women don't get to eat the best food in the household, which can mean children are born underweight. Milk and meat may also be avoided for cultural reasons, as they are in parts of India for example. And sometimes it's just not fully appreciated how important fruit and vegetables are.

Now, I had it drummed in to me that we don't say malnutrition, but 'starvation and starvation related disease' in our propaganda, but we may need to add ignorance to that phrase.

The Lancet has a series of articles here.

http://www.thelancet.com/series/maternal-and-child-nutrition

One wee fact, that 3 million figures is 45% of all Childhood deaths, apparently.

And from one of the Lancet papers:

Quote:

Framing of undernutrition reduction as an apolitical issue is short sighted and
self-defeating. Political calculations are at the basis of eff ective coordination between
sectors, national and subnational levels, private sector engagement, resource
mobilisation, and state accountability to its citizens.

[alanjjohnstone]

i am not sure of the source but i remember reading that the proscription in eating cows in India was due to the importance of them as pulling the plough. If in a famine situation you end up slaughtering your water buffalo, what happens when you need to prepare the fields and sow for the the next harvest – you can't – consequently the famine continues. And so to ensure it doesn't happen it is incorporated into religious teachings.I can't recall milk products being forbidden in India. In fact, the article i read on the purpose of cow-eating ban it  specifically referred to keeping them alive for this purpose. Perhaps by some Jain ascetics, perhaps, but  milk was definitely used by every hindu i knew of. Of course keeping it fresh without refridgeration was the problem so it was made into yoghurt a lot of the time.There is a common in parts of Asia of lack of the lactose tolerance that makes consumption of dairy products unpopular  in their diet and it took a genetic aberration to permit it in what is now Turkey. Where i stay soya milk is popular probably for this reason but more and more asians no longer have this intolerance to milk-based products – evolution in practice.As for the importance of veg to the daily diet, certain in Thailand it is fully appreciated, much more so than in the West from my experience of the "Glasgow Diet" and with a much wider variety of greens to choose from. And in South India vegetarians are numerous. "Pure Veg" restaurants are everywhere. The point on sexual discrimination to eating i think has been found to be generally true.But also obesity is now being increasingly included in the health concerns of poverty…too much of the wrong food eaten by the poor 

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