Food and Health Condition
WHO warns that six of the current risks of further injury to health are directly related to food
At present, agencies and prestigious scientific societies do not hesitate to attribute to a pronounced dietary weight in the constraints or determinants of health, though the dependency ratio between food and health has been a constant.
In ancient cultures and civilizations, this finding was more or less diffuse, but was expressed in forceful phrases meaning as “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine your food” Hippocrates attributed, teacher, or “father of Medicine. ” Over time, this association has not declined despite the period of darkness scientist who lived during the Middle Ages, but at this time was based more on trickery than rationality.
It was not until the early modern and scientific revolution associated with the Enlightenment when he laid the scientific basis of modern medicine. Already in the nineteenth and twentieth century, thanks in part to the birth of Food Science as such and epidemiology as a discipline organized, began to inform current knowledge about the relationship between food and health, both in terms of population groups as to specific individuals.
Refer to the seven countries study is to make the concept of “Mediterranean diet” is understood more as a lifestyle than a rigid set of dietary guidelines. The epidemiological investigation is considered the forerunner of the current relationship between diet and health.
In the early fifties of the twentieth century, Ancel Keys, a U.S. cardiologist and epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, decided to study the incidence of coronary heart disease in a large group of people (seven countries). His idea was simple: identify the population with a lower rate of heart problems, is going to analyze your lifestyle, including diet, and recommend follow-up at the coronary risk populations.
In this study, the population showed a Mediterranean influence to have better cardiovascular health, very similar to that of eastern citizens (Japan). For reasons more pragmatic than other doctor in the interests of the Keys-Mediterranean culture is closer to the Western lifestyle that the Japanese-Mediterranean pattern of living rose to hegemony dietetics. Currently, the Mediterranean diet is considered a benchmark in terms of prevention of many diseases.
Countless scientific studies now follow the path of “the seven countries study” and highlight the virtues of native food consumption in the Mediterranean area in relation to the prevention of many diseases (cancer, lung diseases, asthma, allergies, neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s), in addition to emphasizing the importance of a healthy lifestyle.
At the beginning of the decade of the eighties of last century, Canadian Health Minister Marc Lalonde released a paper entitled “A new perspective on the health of Canadians” (New perspectives on the health of Canadians), better known as “The Lalonde report. ” It set out broadly the determinants of population health. In total, identified four major determinants and were attributed a specific weight:
Lifestyles: how to feed a population, how it moves and what level of physical activity is, if you register addictive behaviors such as smoking, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. These factors characterize the lifestyle of a population and their health condition. The role of these circumstances was quantified in 43% of the total.
Endogenous factors: this heading includes aspects related to genetics and that influence health. Their role amounted to 27%.
Environmental factors, from environmental contaminants and food, until stress or traffic, these aspects must be taken into account by conditioning a particular health state. Its importance in the Lalonde report was 19%.
The health system: the different models of health that a population can also be embedded condition its long-term health. Same diagnosis of appendicitis can have a very different outcome depending, among other things, the health resources at its disposal the patient. Not be the same in Canada than in a Third World country. This determinant was quantified with 11% of the total.
The Lalonde report marked a revolution in its time because not only described the determinants of population health, but also quantified its importance and the power detected was framed with a higher relative weight to be an inherent part of style life. In the same decade, in 1988, the public health service of the U.S., “The Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health” (Report on nutrition and health of Surgeon General), stated that “for most of citizens who do not smoke or drink excessively, your feeding style will be the factor that most influences their long-term health. ”
The latest: the current WHO reports
For the World Health Organization (WHO) as the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system, the degree of relationship between diet and health has not gone unnoticed.
In its 2002 report on “Health in the world: reducing risks and promoting healthy lifestyles” (World Health Report 2002: Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life), the WHO says that in the ten current risks of further injury health in the world, six are directly related to food. These risks as they are listed in the report are, in order of importance: hypertension, alcohol, poor water and sanitation, high cholesterol, iron deficiency, obesity and overweight.
In addition, food is closely related not only to health and life expectancy, but also the quality of this life expectancy. This is one of the conclusions of the Report on health and nutrition in Europe 2004 “WHO (Food and health in Europe 2004). It states that represent pathological causes loss of healthy life years compared to expectations, 41% respond to diseases that have an important nutritional component, such as cardiovascular disease (61%) or diabetes mellitus (5% ), along with some cancers and tumors (32%) and nutritional deficiencies (2%). The 38% are diseases with a less important nutritional component, such as neuropsychiatric disorders (51%), respiratory diseases (13%), and parasitic infections (10%), digestive disorders (9.5%), respiratory tract infections (6.8%), etc., and 21% to complaints in which no dietary issues are particularly notable (musculo-skeletal diseases, issues or perinatal conditions, etc.).
INVESTMENT IN HEALTH
An important aspect of the “Lalonde Report” refers to investment in developed countries in preventing the four determinants of health described. Spending to improve health expectations, understood in terms of both human and economic resources, differs depending on the decisive question.
This document states that developed countries spend 88% of its resources to improving the determinant with a relative decline in health, the health system (11%), 8% to improve the endogenous factors such as genetics, whose relative weight was quantified in 27% and 2% for each of the remaining determinants: lifestyle and environmental factors. Marc Lalonde noted that most of the resources were reserved for the improvement of palliative or curative factors, as opposed to factors with a strong preventive.
Everything indicates that, apart from the various campaigns which in turn can make the health authorities, improved health outcome through the power must be based largely on the initiative and interest.
credit to: Juan Revenga