Where In The World Is The Best Place For Healthy Eating?

January 15, 2014





Where did the U.S. land?





The team’s conclusion?

“Basically, if you arrive from Mars and design a food system, you probably couldn’t design a worse one than what we have today on Earth,” Oxfam’s Max Lawson tells The Salt. “There is enough food overall in the world to feed everyone. But 900 million people still don’t have enough to eat, and 1 billion people are obese. It’s a crazy situation.”


A country’s score depends on how much food is available (so richer countries have an advantage), the nutritional value of that food and how diet helps or harms the nation’s health.

The team measured that last metric by looking at diabetes and obesity rates in each country. Not surprisingly, that’s where the U.S. stumbles: We ranked 120th out of 125 countries in terms of how diet influences health.

The problem is linked to poverty, Lawson says.

“Food is very, very cheap in the U.S. compared to most countries,” he explains. “But the fact is you end up with people malnourished in one of the richest countries because they don’t have access to fresh vegetables at a cheap enough price to make a balanced diet.”

At the other end of the spectrum are countries that struggle just to get enough food on each family’s table each day. Chad, Ethiopia and Angola ranked at the overall bottom of Oxfam’s list, in large part because of high malnutrition rates and the relatively high cost of foods in these countries.

“People think that hunger is inevitable, but that’s just not true,” Lawson says. “There is enough food in the world to ensure that nobody goes to bed hungry.”

The problem, in large part, is getting fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains to people who need it, he says. “Even in countries with famines, there’s still often enough food. Someone is hoarding it, or it hasn’t been distributed.”

And that problem isn’t new. “Very famously,” he says, “during the Irish potato famine, the British were exporting Irish wheat to the U.K.”
