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THE POWER OF NUTRITION Ways You Didn't Know Nutrition Is Affecting Your Life By Monica Sellecchia Millions of articles are written every day bombarding you with ways eating a healthy diet can help you lose weight, clear your skin, help you sleep better and fight off the common cold. Well what if, instead of focusing on how nutrition affects you as an individual, we focus on some ways nutrition affects the world that may have never crossed your mind? The effects of nutrition when viewed at a macro level can have everyday impact on your life, positive and negative. These effects may alter both the health and socioeconomic status of the world or just your family. As more and more research is performed, we are now able to see just how powerful nutrition really is. Here are three topics that give you an in depth look into the power of nutrition. POPULATION You may not have thought about the direct effect that nutrition has on how many people actually live in the world. Maybe you’ve considered how starvation plays a role or maybe not, but here’s some perspective: Roughly 17 million of the 140 million children born each year are born to undernourished mothers. Poor nutrition is the cause of 45% of deaths in children under five. That translates to 3.1 million children dying each year because they don’t have enough food to sustain their health. The children that do survive to adulthood will grow to be one of the 800 million people who go undernourished on a daily basis, consuming less than the recommended 2,100 calories a day. It’s 2020 – how is this still happening? That’s quite powerful! Nutrition also affects world population in regards to the number of people that are actually born. 30% of infertility is due to either being overweight or underweight, according to the National Infertility Association in the US. That means that poor nutrition, whether it leads you to being larger or smaller than what is healthy, can determine your ability to conceive. This not only affects women, but men who are looking to have a baby as well. Poor nutrition negatively affects men’s testosterone and other hormonal levels. Evidence shows that a healthy diet and lifestyle can potentially help with fertility and fetal well being, resulting in more successful births. 8 Nutrition Quarterly · 2020 – Volume 4 What We’re Reading