Fatal eating habits

Link between imports, loss of production and diseases

THE food we eat can be a factor in whether we contract diabetes, a non-communicable disease (NCD), and maybe even some forms of cancers.

This was a comment made by public health physician and epidemiologist Professor Nigel Unwin as part of an effort to determine the causes of NCDs in the

Yasawa Group.

Working closely with FRIEND Fiji (Foundation of Rural Integrated Enterprises and Development), the University of Exerter academic said those diseases were the prominent cause of death globally.

“One of the factors that are responsible for NCDs is the diet,” he said. “One’s diet is a major contribution to the risks of NCDs and changing diets can actually help prevent them.

“One of the really striking things is that over the past 20 years there’s been this increase in food imports and these imports tend to be unhealthy amounts of highly processed or alter processed foods.”

He said with the purchase of food imports also meant the loss of farming production.

“There’s a lot of loss in that especially with loss of farming production, marketing in those companies and awareness in those foods as people see them as desirable but that is an underlining driver of increase in diabetes and probably some cancers as well.”

He said their main focus was on how to link improving local nutritious food production as a way of providing more nutritious food into communities.

“We started to think about how can we do work that will start to understand where people are getting their food from and why they are choosing to get their food from these places.”

The University of Exerter is working together with USP on the Community Food project funded by the National Institue for Health Research in the United Kingdom.

The tertiary institutions partnered with FRIEND Fiji on the four-year project.