Diet Therapy and Public Health

Dear colleagues,

Submissions are invited for the Special Issue on “Diet Therapy and Public Health” in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. For detailed information on the journal, I refer you to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph.

Malnutrition in all its forms is a key risk factor for premature death and disease worldwide (WHO, 2017). The various forms of malnutrition include general undernourishment, specific micro- and macronutrient deficiencies, unhealthy or unbalanced diets and overnutrition, as well as related conditions such as stunting, wasting, and overweight and obesity. Approximately 20% of the burden of disease and of all premature deaths globally are attributed to nutritional risk factors, including malnutrition and unhealthy diets (Afshin et al., 2017; Murray et al., 2019; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2021). The prevalence of chronic undernourishment (defined as a lower than required habitual energy intake) has decreased over the past decades but remains high globally (9% as of 2017), with particularly high rates in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (21%) and South Asia (14%) (Roser and Ritchie, 2019). Worryingly, there are signs that progress to reduce undernutrition has stalled or reversed since 2010, and even worsened by the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis both globally and in the aforementioned regions (Roser and Ritchie, 2019). Concurrently, the global prevalence of obesity has roughly doubled from 6% to 13% among adults since 1985 (WHO, 2017) and risen sevenfold from 1% to 7% among children since 1975 (Abarca-Gómez et al., 2017). In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in particular, the prevalence of obesity has met or surpassed the prevalence of undernutrition. As such, undernourishment, unhealthy diets, overnutrition, and obesity coexist and interact, both within communities and over the life course. The terms “double burden of malnutrition (DBM)” (Popkin et al., 2020) and “nutrition syndemic” (Swinburn et al., 2019) have been coined to describe this phenomenon (Wells et al., 2020).

It therefore makes sense that diet therapy be regarded as the integral component of all global strategies to prevent and control DBM and major degenerative diseases such as coronary heart diseases, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and cancer. However, the discourse of diet therapy in some countries (LMIC, in particular) is still unclear, and in some instances, it is highly polarized and structured to favor a singular approach (i.e., diet therapy is focused on treating or rehabilitating an individual). This requires a drastic change so as to accommodate recent broad agreements that promote multi-layered diet therapy public health approaches (WHO, 2017 and Swinburn et al., 2013), including a combination of multiple nutrition-related policy interventions, as well as strategies to improve food environments at a broad range of levels (e.g., city, state, or nation), targets (e.g., consumers, organizations, industry), domains and mechanisms (e.g., consumer preferences or choices, food formulations, availability and accessibility).

The current call, therefore, is for international researchers to submit their work on multi-layered public health approaches that will be collated to form the 2022 Special Issue on “Diet Therapy and Public Health”. 

Prof. Dr. Zandile June-Rose Mchiza
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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