This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable.

Interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers

working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My name is Roy Steiner. I'm the managing director of the Food Initiative at the Rockefeller Foundation,

and my solvable is to reduce by 50% diet-related diseases in our generation.

Okay, so this is a big one, but it wouldn't be solvable if it wasn't.

When researching this episode, I was blown away to learn that today we're in a global

epidemic of malnutrition. Of course, I know that in some parts of the world, you know, there's a

hunger problem, but a global malnutrition epidemic? It turns out that that

means both over and undernutrition. In the past 30 years, obesity rates have doubled in adults

and tripled in children. The major nutritional issue used to be undernourishment. In the 1970s, 35% of the world's population were

undernourished. Now that's 12% and most of the countries affected are experiencing conflict or war.

So I guess that shows that nutrition is linked to many other problems, like not just poverty.

And again, the contrasts are crazy.

While children in the developed world are increasingly at risk of obesity,

one out of six children, that's roughly 100 million children,

in developing countries, is underweight.

Diet contributes to almost 700,000 deaths each year here in the US,

from things like heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes.

In fact, according to the World Health Organization,

diet quality is now the leading contributing factor of death

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