Obesity or Starvation? WE COULD DO PLENTY ABOUT THIS ISSUE.

The Opposite of Obesity: Undernutrition Overwhelms the World's Children

An alarming number of studies report that overnutrition and the resulting obesity are a growing health problem for children in industrialized nations and even some developing ones. The explosion of such studies might seem to suggest that starvation is a thing of the past, yet children in many developing countries still go hungry. Furthermore, a lack of calories and nutrients--or undernutrition--can worsen the effects of infectious disease, and thereby causes half of all child deaths worldwide, report public health experts at The Johns Hopkins University and the World Health Organization in the 1 July 2004 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Hunger persists. A severely malnourished 4-year-old in Ethiopia is typical of thousands of children around the world whose health and lives are devastated by lack of adequate food.
Image credit: Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures