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The Crisis in Nutrition and Poverty

Two issues critical to the future are being ignored in the countdown for the population to reach 9 billion: the supreme importance of the mother, and the significance of brainspecific nutrition to prosperity or poverty. Both were omitted by the Foresight Task Force in its report on the future of food and farming (Foresight Task Force, 2011). Despite this omission the think tank identified the gravity and the challenge of population growth, which is now exponential. They focused on the protein requirements to be met. However, it is the brain that makes us different from apes. The critical period of brain development is before birth. A mother’s milk contains the least amount of protein of any large mammal. Protein is not the limiting principle, and it is that which makes the projections for the future even more formidable. Yet the gap between the understanding of nutritional science, epigenetics with the nutritional needs for maternal health, and the future health and ability of the newborn, is too wide for comfort. Sir Kenneth Stuart, a previous medical advisor to the Commonwealth, has collaborated with Lord Soulsby in writing three seminal papers on global health and poverty in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (Stuart and Soulsby, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). In these papers can be found a deep-seated conviction of the need and the urgency to address poverty. The authors describe ‘the background of misplaced optimism and false hopes which characterized the UK’s own record of health inequalities’. They identify these with efforts set by the challenge of poverty. The elimination of global poverty has been recognized as a priority over the past 50 years or more (Black et al., 1980). Yet even in the UK health and economic inequalities are widening (Hacking et al., 2011). To some, the answer to poverty is seen through the eyes of industrial investment and enhanced earning capacity.