According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), between 720 million and 811 million people faced hunger in 2020, an increase of 161 million from 2019. Malnutrition is linked to hunger, but according to John Hopkins Medical, there is a distinction between the two, even though they frequently coexist. Malnutrition refers to a lack of nutrients required for proper health and development.

Malnutrition is one of the most serious issues confronting our societies today. Getting the best nutrition is impossible in many countries due to rising commodity prices, declining purchasing power, and insufficient food supply.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, there are significant gaps in the food system that prevent everyone from having access to nutritious foods at an affordable price. The cost of a healthy diet is significantly higher than the cost of a diet that provides enough calories but lacks nutritional value. Given that women and children have greater nutritional needs, these costs are even higher for them.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) also noted that food costs have risen steadily in the region ever since the pandemic began in early 2020. Rising unemployment and shrinking product markets contributed to the pandemic’s food crisis.

Both urban and rural households were less able to purchase food due to significant income and remittance losses. Additionally, local market supply disruptions decreased food availability and raised local food prices. The cost of food increased due to supply chain disruptions and currency depreciation, which posed additional challenges for import-dependent economies.

The WHO stated that the affordability of healthy diets, which is essential to ensuring food security and nutrition for all, has become nearly impossible for poor people in Asia and the Pacific as a result of rising prices for fruits, vegetables, and dairy products.

New app to track malnutrition

Meanwhile, technology can aid in the reduction of malnutrition. A key feature of a new app developed by the global nonprofit Action Against Hunger is the ability to detect acute malnutrition in children. It said that “the tool has the potential to change the way the world screens millions of children for malnutrition.”

The need for creative solutions to end malnutrition is now more urgent than ever because, according to the organization, more than 2,000 children die every day from causes related to hunger. “Malnutrition diagnostics are typically slow, if they are even available, in places where hunger is deadly, “ it said, adding that the current detection methods require health workers to transport heavy height boards and cumbersome bucket scales from village to village, and these are time-consuming and inaccurate.

Action Against Hunger’s new Gold Anthem Awardee mobile app can screen children for severe acute malnutrition (SAM), with just a “quick photo”, providing health professionals with useful tools to identify malnutrition more quickly and accurately. The app compares scans of a potentially malnourished child with scans of a healthy child using body scanning technology and morphological methods.

The app is faster, easier, and more accurate than today’s standard of care because it is designed for poor, rural areas with no internet connection, low literacy levels, and the most basic Android phones in widespread use, Action Against Hunger said.

The organization has conducted large-scale pilots in Senegal, where the app is used by more than 90 clinics, and plans to expand the program to Guatemala, Mali, and Mauritania. Globally, an estimated 75% of acutely malnourished children who require treatment do not have access to it, despite the fact that extremely cost-effective treatments have a cure rate of more than 90%.

Getting to the bottom of the problem

While technology can aid in the detection and monitoring of malnutrition, the problem must still be addressed at its root.

The ADB recommended focusing policy efforts on creating resilient food systems for the long term in order to address the rising food insecurity in Asia and the Pacific. This can be done by assisting farmers in avoiding weather shocks, preparing for them, and adapting to them. Farmers can prepare for extreme weather events by investing in early warning systems like crop modeling and spatial information technology.

In addition, the WHO report calls for a transformation of the food systems in the region in order to improve the affordability of and access to healthy, sustainable diets for families. Everyone and everywhere needs to have access to nourishing and healthy diets. The report suggests that integrated approaches and policies are required to make sure that happens.

SOURCES:
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/food
https://www.hopkinsallchildrens.org/
https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/press-releases/innovative-app-for-detecting-malnutrition-wins-2023-gold-anthem-award/
https://blogs.adb.org/blog/millions-are-going-hungry-in-post-pandemic-asia-here-s-how-to-respond
https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/item/20-01-2021-un-agencies-warn-economic-impact-of-covid-19-and-worsening-inequalities-will-fuel-malnutrition-for-billions-in-asia-and-the-pacific

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Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) found that late eating increases our appetite and obesity risk, and also affects our energy expenditure and molecular pathways in adipose tissue (fat). Studies have highlighted the simultaneous effects of late eating on the three main players in body weight regulation and obesity risk: regulation of calorie intake, the number of calories burnt, and molecular changes in fat tissue. 

“…late eating is associated with increased obesity risk, increased body fat, and impaired weight loss success. We wanted to understand why,” said Dr. Frank Scheer, Director of the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. 

According to the latest research, eating later – by four hours – makes a significant difference for our hunger levels, the way we burn calories after we eat, and the way we store fat, revealed Nina Vujovic, a postdoctorate researcher in the same Program at BWH. 

Vujovic, Scheer, and their team studied 16 patients with a body mass index (BMI) in the overweight or obese range. Each participant completed two laboratory protocols: one with a strictly scheduled early meal schedule, and the other with the exact same meals, each scheduled about four hours later in the day. In the last two to three weeks before starting each of the in-laboratory protocols, participants maintained fixed sleep and wake schedules, and in the final three days before entering the laboratory, they strictly followed identical diets and meal schedules at home.  

In the lab, participants regularly documented their hunger and appetite, provided frequent small blood samples throughout the day, and had their body temperature and energy expenditure measured. To measure how eating time affected molecular pathways involved in adipogenesis, or how the body stores fat, investigators collected biopsies of adipose tissue from a subset of participants during laboratory testing in both the early and late eating protocols, to enable comparison of gene expression patterns/levels between these two eating conditions. 

Results revealed that eating later had profound effects on hunger and appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin, which influence our drive to eat. Specifically, levels of the hormone leptin, which signals satiety, were decreased across the 24 hours in the late eating condition compared to the early eating conditions. When participants ate later, they also burned calories at a slower rate and exhibited adipose tissue gene expression towards increased adipogenesis and decreased lipolysis, which promote fat growth.  

The findings convey converging physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying the correlation between late eating and increased obesity risk. 

By tightly controlling for behavioural and environmental factors such as physical activity, posture, sleep, and light exposure, the researchers were able to detect changes in the different control systems involved in energy balance, a marker of how our bodies use the food we consume – however, in real life, many of these factors may themselves be influenced by meal timing, the researchers note. 

A lonely person looking upon people having fun together activates the same brain region that lights up when someone who is hungry sees a picture of a plate of food, according to neuroscientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US. Their findings provide a clue as to how social stress or social isolation affects people’s behaviour and motivation; they also hope to predict how isolation affects different age groups and how to alleviate these cravings.

“People who are forced to be isolated crave social interactions similarly to the way a hungry person craves food,” said Rebecca Saxe, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “[Our findings] fits the intuitive idea that positive social interactions are a basic human need, and acute loneliness is an aversive state that motivates people to repair what is lacking, similar to hunger.”

Hoping to mimic a sudden and strange isolation environment, the neuroscientists enlisted 40 healthy college students as volunteers and confined them to a windowless room on MIT’s campus for 10 hours – they were not allowed to use their phones or see or speak to anyone, essentially avoiding any social contact.

The same instructions applied to a fasting experiment conducted at MIT on a different day.

The volunteers had also been trained beforehand on how to get into an MRI machine, so that they could do it by themselves when the period of isolation or fasting ended; and were scanned to observe brain activity while they were looking at images of food, images of people interacting, and neutral images such as flowers.

Read: How you can curb your sugar cravings

Neuroscientists found that when their socially isolated subjects saw photos of people enjoying social interactions, the “craving signal” within a tiny structure in the midbrain known as substantia nigra would be similar to the signal produced when they saw pictures of food after fasting. This amount of activation in the substantia nigra was later identified to be a general signal representing a variety of cravings, but correlated with how strongly the volunteers rated their feelings of craving either food or social interaction.

Responses to isolation also varied depending on the subject’s normal levels of loneliness – certain volunteers who reported feeling chronically isolated months before the study was done showed weaker cravings for social interaction after the 10-hour isolation period than those who reported a richer social life.

Now that the researchers have established that they can observe the effects of social isolation on brain activity, Saxe says they can try to answer many additional questions, such as whether virtual social contacts such as video calls help to alleviate cravings for social interaction.