Even as fruit and vegetables remain prohibitively expensive in many countries, “public support for cereals and sugar, combined with private marketing and clever packaging, is encouraging a transition to unhealthy diets in low and middle-income countries.”
An opinion piece released by the World Bank under its World Bank Blogs is asserting that the fact that the onset of the coronavirus has caught several countries with their nutritional guard ‘down’ may not only result in higher mortality rates than would otherwise have been the case but is also likely to make the ‘burden’ of treating victims back to health considerably more onerous.
The May 13 article, authored by Bank officials Muhammad Ali Pate and Martien van Nieuwkoop, who serve as Directors of Health, Nutrition and Population and Agriculture and Food, respectively, assert that the pandemic has raised the stakes for consumers, producers and policy makers globally, on account of the fact that the long-entrenched and widespread habit of unhealthy diets are contributing to preexisting conditions that put many people more at risk. What compounds the problem, the authors of the article assert, is that “illness also means loss of income.”
