Today Bruce Lee, from the Global Obesity Prevention Center at Johns Hopkins, tells us about the need for healthy food, no matter where you are. Obesity is an issue that affects not only people in the developed world—more than 60% of overweight or obese people live in low- and middle-income countries. All food is not created equal—it’s not enough to provide food to all people; the type of food matters too.

It sounds easy. We see and hear the advice everywhere. “Eat healthier. Eat more fruit and vegetables. Choose fresher foods over processed foods. Avoid foods with high fat and high sugar contents, artificial ingredients and preservatives.” But, we don’t always follow this advice. In reality, eating healthily is much harder to do. Healthy food like fruit and vegetables can be harder to find, harder to prepare, more difficult to store and keep fresh and more expensive to purchase. Unless you have a personal chef, eating healthily takes effort.  

Now imagine yourself in a low-income country, where you have don’t even have the food options available to those in higher-income countries. There are few organic markets, vegan clubs or salad buffets. There may not even be refrigerators or freezers to store fresh food. Instead you have to eat what you have available. When the choice is between a candy bar and no food, you choose the candy bar.

All food is not created equal. It’s not enough to provide food to all populations. The type of food matters. Every December, radio stations play “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, which was composed and sung by the all-star musical group Band Aid to raise money for African locations experiencing famine. While the main chorus in the song is the well-meaning words “feed the world”, perhaps a more appropriate refrain would be “feed the world healthy food.” Not as easy to sing, and it may require a re-write of the song. But today and tomorrow, this new refrain may be necessary.

Our world is facing a healthy food availability crisis. Obesity continues to spread, not just in high-income countries, but at an alarming pace throughout low- and middle-income countries. Chew on this fact (instead of a candy bar): currently, a third of the world's population is overweight or obese, and over 60% of overweight or obese people live in low- and middle-income countries. And the numbers are getting worse. The consequences to the individual and all aspects of society are substantial, including lower productivity, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, early death, greater cost to and strain on the health care system and decreased ability of businesses to operate and compete. While the food situation may not be the only cause of obesity, lack of access to healthy food is likely a major contributor.

Getting healthy food to the world’s populations is not easy and requires new systems to produce, transport, store, deliver and prepare the food. Farmers, food manufacturers, governments, funders educators and populations need to work together to develop and implement these new systems. Countries everywhere lack these systems. As our work at the Global Obesity Prevention Center has shown, even many locations in high-income countries do not have systems that provide low-income populations with ready access to healthy foods. Bill and Melinda Gates have famously said that “every person deserves the opportunity to lead a healthy and productive life.” Living a healthy life requires healthy food. Let’s put in the systems that afford everyone that opportunity to eat healthy food.