World Health Day 2015: 5 Easy Tips, Activities To Improve Global Nutrition, Diet, Food Safety

by - Apr 7, 2015

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World Health Day is marked every year on April 7, but this year’s theme of food safety is particularly relevant at the moment. Given a recent outbreak of antibiotic resistant shigella along with ongoing debates over obesity, nutrition and other matters of food and health, it seems more important than ever for people to watch what and how they eat. In celebration of World Health Day, here are five tips that can help you adopt a healthier, safer diet.

Eat less red meat. Dietary guidelines from the U.S. Department of Agriculture call for a diet high in veggies, fruits, whole grains, low-fat dairy and nuts, and low in red and processed meat. The potential benefits include weight loss and lower stress, and eating less meat also reduces your risk of ingesting harmful bacteria that could be in the meat.

Eliminate junk and fast food from your diet. Does your snack come in a crinkly bag or wrapped in plastic you have to rip apart? Are numerous unpronounceable ingredients listed on the back? If so, it would be best not to eat it. Instead, aim to eat nutritious meals based on the dietary guidelines mentioned above. Instead of a bag of potato ships, snack on raw almonds or eat an apple. Instead of buying fast food for dinner, learn to prepare simple healthy meals. It’s not as expensive or time-consuming as you might think.

Cook your food thoroughly. Fully cooking meat, eggs and seafood kills bacteria and helps eliminate the risk of catching food-borne illnesses, like salmonella or shigella, that are not only unpleasant but can also be downright dangerous — even life-threatening — if they become complicated.

Wash your fruit and vegetables. They could be contaminated with harmful bacteria from the water or soil in which the produce was grown. Contamination can also occur during storage, as the Food and Drug Administration points out. Rinse fruits or scrub them well under running water. Even if you peel your vegetables and fruits, you should wash them beforehand — the more careful you are, the fewer your chances are of getting food poisoning.

Along with maintaining a healthy diet, exercise regularly. The Mayo Clinic recommends getting 30 minutes of exercise every day. Aside from helping you sleep, improving your energy levels and making you feel happier and better overall, exercise will also improve your health by lowering your chance of developing chronic problems like diabetes or high blood pressure.

World Health Day 2015: From farm to plate, make food safe

World Health Day

by - Apr 7, 2015

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Geneva – New data on the harm caused by foodborne illnesses underscore the global threats posed by unsafe foods, and the need for coordinated, cross-border action across the entire food supply chain, according to WHO, which next week is dedicating its annual World Health Day to the issue of food safety.

World Health Day will be celebrated on 7 April, with WHO highlighting the challenges and opportunities associated with food safety under the slogan “From farm to plate, make food safe.”

“Food production has been industrialized and its trade and distribution have been globalized,” says WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. “These changes introduce multiple new opportunities for food to become contaminated with harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, or chemicals.”

Dr Chan adds: “A local food safety problem can rapidly become an international emergency. Investigation of an outbreak of foodborne disease is vastly more complicated when a single plate or package of food contains ingredients from multiple countries.”

Unsafe food can contain harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances, and cause more than 200 diseases – ranging from diarrhoea to cancers. Examples of unsafe food include undercooked foods of animal origin, fruits and vegetables contaminated with faeces, and shellfish containing marine biotoxins.

Today, WHO is issuing the first findings from what is a broader ongoing analysis of the global burden of foodborne diseases. The full results of this research, being undertaken by WHO’s Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG), are expected to be released in October 2015.

Some important results are related to enteric infections caused by viruses, bacteria and protozoa that enter the body by ingestion of contaminated food. The initial FERG figures, from 2010, show that:

there were an estimated 582 million cases of 22 different foodborne enteric diseases and 351 000 associated deaths;
the enteric disease agents responsible for most deaths were Salmonella Typhi (52 000 deaths), enteropathogenic E. coli (37 000) and norovirus (35 000);
the African region recorded the highest disease burden for enteric foodborne disease, followed by South-East Asia;
over 40% people suffering from enteric diseases caused by contaminated food were children aged under 5 years.

Unsafe food also poses major economic risks, especially in a globalized world. Germany’s 2011 E.coli outbreak reportedly caused US$ 1.3 billion in losses for farmers and industries and US$ 236 million in emergency aid payments to 22 European Union Member States.

Efforts to prevent such emergencies can be strengthened, however, through development of robust food safety systems that drive collective government and public action to safeguard against chemical or microbial contamination of food. Global and national level measures can be taken, including using international platforms, like the joint WHO-FAO International Food Safety Authorities Network (INFOSAN), to ensure effective and rapid communication during food safety emergencies.

At the consumer end of the food supply chain, the public plays important roles in promoting food safety, from practising safe food hygiene and learning how to take care when cooking specific foods that may be hazardous (like raw chicken), to reading the labels when buying and preparing food. The WHO Five Keys to Safer Food explain the basic principles that each individual should know all over the world to prevent foodborne diseases.

“It often takes a crisis for the collective consciousness on food safety to be stirred and any serious response to be taken,” says Dr Kazuaki Miyagishima, Director of WHO’s Department of Food Safety and Zoonoses. “The impacts on public health and economies can be great. A sustainable response, therefore, is needed that ensures standards, checks and networks are in place to protect against food safety risks.”

WHO is working to ensure access to adequate, safe, nutritious food for everyone. The Organization supports countries to prevent, detect and respond to foodborne disease outbreaks—in line with the Codex Alimentarius, a collection of international food standards, guidelines and codes of practice covering all the main foods.

Food safety is a cross-cutting issue and shared responsibility that requires participation of non-public health sectors (i.e. agriculture, trade and commerce, environment, tourism) and support of major international and regional agencies and organizations active in the fields of food, emergency aid, and education.