Undernutrition Kills Kids Yearly

Reference: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080117/hl_afp/healthchildrennutrition_080117211620

Now I have been vindicated when earlier I mentioned the main problem of the post-modern diet is the risk of sub-clinical malnutrition. What is under-nutrition but malnutrition?

According to French researchers, under-nutrition "is to blame for 3.5 million deaths among children aged under five each year, but most of the fatalities occur in 20 countries, where targeted aid programmes could swiftly address the problem."

This is the world-wide malnutrition problem caused by lack of food, but you can still go on to claim that sub-clinical malnutrition is common in developed countries where children do not go to bed hungry, but get nutrient-poor food daily like carbonated beverages, processed meat, and factory meats which are heavily loaded with chemicals designed to ensure product makes it to your dinner table.

While I am not saying more people should go out hunting, I am saying that shopping in a grocery store is not the same as growing your own vegetables, raising your own chicken and hunting & fishing for part of your food intake.

IMHO hunting and fishing licenses are not done to conserve limited game resources, but to ensure rich hunting & fishing "hobbyists" can afford to get a trophy. The waste of game resources is one travesty of such sport, and such hobbyists should be forced to take lessons on the processing of their game into meat as part of the hunting & fishing licensing process. While I am sure fish suffer as much being hooked and clubbed to death, I am not convinced barb-less hooks and the current practise of catch-and-release is any less traumatic for the fish. However, sports hunters and fishers should limit their hunting and fishing to what they can eat.

Getting back to those kids in developing countries, the main reason they are starving is due to foreign aid not getting to them. In most cases, the privileged few in a given nation are hoarding food supplies stolen from the foreign aid agencies through fraud. A leader of a corrupt nation could easily force an army of "homeless and starving" native to grab what they get and cache it at a specific site. If that army is bigger and stronger than the actual homeless and starving people, then the foreign aid agency can only stand back and watch.

No one knows if 750 out of 1000 people are aligned with the corrupt leader and hoarding while the other 250 get barely enough to last them a day, a week, or a month.

So what actually kills kids in undeveloped countries is not actually under-nutrition but social Darwinism. However, penalizing the corrupt leaders will not help the kids. Only Bill Gates and Frank Giustra can do that, because it is so cheap to feed and care for children in developing nations.

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This post marks my second one where a reference URL is not converted to a working link. This is a good "feature" of my limited interface in the Blogger editor due to it detecting Konqueror. In fact it detects Konqueror and is not fooled by the spoofing Konqueror provides.