Right to healthy food

The focus has rightly been given on the need for healthy foods in place of what are appropriately called junk eatables. This was done on the occasion of the observance of the World Consumer Rights Day last Sunday. According to the Consumers International (CI), poor diets cause 11m deaths annually the world over. Intriguingly, though, poor diet does not necessarily mean deficient in calories or nutrients. In fact, in many cases this means too much of it, thanks to fast foods and beverage - a craze among the young generation. When the global economic impact from obesity is estimated roughly at $2.0 trillion, or 2.8 per cent of the global gross national product (GNP), some idea of the pervasive ill influence can be formed. In Bangladesh, poor nutrition in food had ever remained a problem for the majority. The poor are accustomed to filling their stomach with quantity rather than being mindful about the quality of the foods they eat. Again affluence does not always guarantee balanced and healthy diet. Ignorance and even deliberate adulteration at several points of food harvesting, processing, preservation and cooking are to blame.
It's alarming that the developing countries are catching up with the rich countries where over-consumption of saturated fat and trans-fats along with meat is the norm. Such unhealthy food habit is linked to high blood pressure, high blood glucose, overweight and obesity and high cholesterol - four of the world's top 10 leading risk factors of death. With accumulation of wealth by the upper classes of society, global food chains are making an inroad particularly in the cities of the developing nations, thanks to attractive advertisements. Young people find such food joints a most convenient rendezvous for hanging out, skipping their meals at home - little aware that they are doing a disservice to their gastronomic demand. On the other side of this social trend, the poor cannot even manage the bare minimum foods for their survival, let alone for keeping good health. Thus the food paradigm gives various messages to different segments of people in a country and also globally. What is meant by poor foods in rich society is poles apart from the ones the poor in developing countries eat.
In addition to such conceptual differences, countries like Bangladesh are afflicted with food adulteration and chemical contamination. When the virtue of fruits, fish and vegetables has been extolled by food experts and nutritionists, these items have become suspect in the upmarket for their cultivation, unnatural ripening and preservation, courtesy of excessive use as well as abuse of fertilisers, pesticides and various harmful chemicals. The CI has blamed inadequate consumption of fruits and vegetables for increasing the risk of cardiovascular diseases and some types of cancers which together account for 1.7 million deaths a year in the world. In Bangladesh too the prevalence of these diseases is on the rise. In a situation like this, prevention should be made the bull's eye rather than concentrating on the curative aspects. In that task better it would be to make people aware of developing a healthy dietary habit. At the same time, farming and business practices have to be brought under strict regulations so that agricultural produces maintain a standard free from chemical contamination at all levels.