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Nutrition and Emerging NCD's

Khon Kaen University; Khon Kaen, Thailand: October 27 - November 02, 2013

The challenge for professionals involved in nutritional research and program development is to face the so called "Double Burden of Malnutrition". To this end, the University of Khon Kaen and the University of Potsdam organized a Summer School that focused on “Nutrition and Emerging Non-Communicable Diseases".

 

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Background

Malnutrition is one of the most important constraints to achieve the Millennium Developmental Goals (MDG's) since good health, cognitive development, and productivity cannot be attained without a balanced nutrition. Good nutrition makes an essential contribution to the fight of poverty – it promotes and protects health, reduces mortality especially among children and mothers, and enables children to benefit from school. An increasing number of developing countries must shoulder a “double burden” of malnutrition. The double burden of malnutrition describes the persistence of undernutrition, especially among children, along with a rapid rise of overnutrition and diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease in developing countries. Given current economic and social trends, observed changes in dietary patterns are likely to continue and – combined with changes in lifestyle, particularly the decrease in physical activity – will exacerbate emerging problems of overnutrition and diet-related chronic diseases in developing countries. 

Objectives

The interdisciplinary event aimed not only at advocating evidence based approaches, but also revealed the consequences of ignoring the crisis and to integrate all sectors of society. The main focus points were:

  • Nutrient deficiencies
  • Nutrition in Transition
  • Non-Communicable Diseases

Highlights and Advantages

The participants were offered incentive talks given by numerous experts followed by interactive workshops, which focused on setting the scene, filled the knowledge gap and finally approached the problem of hunger and diet-related chronic diseases in developing countries.

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