“For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed”

It’s an evening of research reading for me. I just read this excellent but rather sad and sobering summary statement:

“2013: For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What’s more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy.”

This sad situation is exactly what MotherNaturesDiet aims to tackle. The human race is on a fast-track to self destruction, and no I am not being melodramatic, this is serious, this situation has been created in JUST 50 years, from when obesity was a rarity, to the largest global epidemic of our time.

Just 50 years.

Project your mind forward another 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, 500 years and tell me what future you see for humanity?

We, the people, all of us, need to get a grip on this problem, fast. There are too many humans, too much cheap low-quality so-called food, and the economic foundations that our modern world rests upon do not function in our long term interests. Adam Smith’s invisible hand fails to price in health, air quality, topsoil degradation, dwindling fossil fuel reserves, increases in cancer and a thousand other factors.

Maybe the disastrous tipping point is still a generation away, maybe two, maybe three, four or five, I don’t know and I do not have the mathematical skill to model such a thing. But I suspect it’s closer that we think. I suspect ‘the party’s almost over’, as we head for a world of ten billion people in less than 40 years from now.

Cheap ‘food’ loaded with cheap worthless calories, processed white grain and processed white sugar and cheap processed oils - these foods are mass produced by just a handful of large companies and distributed around the world. They are the only thing allowing population to increase so rapidly. They are making the world fat, weak and unhealthy. They are trashing the topsoil and draining fresh water courses. They are feeding chemicals to the entire human race.

Sadly, food underlies many of the biggest problems in the world today, and all of the biggest problems coming tomorrow. Behind food, is a complex web of economics, politics, big business and yes, the root of it all - lots and lots of money.

We have to change, starting in the rich world, we ALL have to change. Over the coming months and years, I will be writing about this a LOT more.