Dietary Deficiencies

Abstract

In the middle of 1983, ministers from 36 member countries of the United Nations World Food Council were told that of the 500 million Asians who lived in absolute poverty about 300 million were “endemically undernourished”; that Africa, which 20 years previously had been self-sufficient in food, has replaced Asia as the prinicipal recipient of food supplies, and that in Latin America 70 percent of the rural population shared only 35 percent of the rural income and one in seven was malnourished. Doctors working in western countries should always remember that starvation is the most widespread deficiency disease in the world.