ATNI - driving market change towards nutrition
Now more than ever, it's important to challenge the world's food and beverage manufacturers to address nutrition issues like obesity and undernutrition. Today, we're going to discuss the 2024 Global Access to Nutrition Index, a very important ranking system that evaluates companies on their nutrition related policies, product portfolios, marketing practices, and engagement with stakeholders. The index is an accountability strategy produced by ATNI, the Access to Nutrition Initiative, a global nonprofit foundation seeking to drive market change for nutrition. Our guest today is Greg Garrett, Executive Director of ATNI. Interview Summary You know, I very much admire the work you and your colleagues have done on this index. It fills such an important need in the field and I'm eager to dive in and talk a little bit more about it. So, let's start with this. You know, we've all heard of the concept of social determinants of health and more recently, people have begun talking about corporate determinants of health. And your organization really is focused on corporate determinants of nutrition. Let's start with a question that kind of frames all this. What's the role of industry in nutrition, according to the way you're looking at things? And how does the Global Index shine a light on this topic? Thanks for the question. We're working primarily quite downstream with large manufacturers and retailers. But we hope to affect change across the value chain by working with that group. Of course, when we talk about private sector in food, that's a very, very broad terminology that we're using. It could include farmers on the one hand, looking all the way upstream, all the way through to SMEs, aggregators, processors, manufacturers. SMEs are what? Small and medium enterprises, small and medium enterprises, local ones. All the way through to the multinational food and beverage manufacturers. But also catering organizations and restaurants. When we talk about business what we're trying to do is ensure that business cares about portability, and access to safe and nutritious food. And I think we can say pretty safely, based on the data which we'll talk about, that the health aspects of food are still not as, they're not at the forefront like they should be. Yet. We'll dive in and talk a little bit more about what the index is and what it shows in a minute. But let's start with a kind of broader question. What is the role of diet and consumption of processed foods in influencing health? Yes, so they say now one in five deaths are related to poor diet. It's arguably now the biggest risk factor related to global morbidity and mortality. We've seen in the last 20 years a slight slowing down of our efforts to combat malnutrition and undernutrition. Whereas we've seen over nutrition, obesity, really taking off. And that's not just in high income countries, but also low- and middle-income countries. So, you know, it might be too little good food and that can lead to at the extreme end of things wasting. It might be too little micronutrients, which can lead to all kinds of micronutrient deficiencies or hidden hunger that leads to many adverse outcomes. Including, for example, cognitive decline or reduced immune system. And then, in terms of diabetes and obesity, we're seeing that really skyrocket. Not only in countries where we have excessive food intake, but also in low- and middle-income countries where they have too much food with a lot of, say, empty calories. Not enough nutrients that are needed. In fact, the recent numbers that we've been working with, it looks like in the last 20 years, obesity rates have gone from about 7.9 percent to 15.9 percent. And by 2030, it might be that 20 percent of global population is considered obese if we don't mitigate that. Right, and of course that number is many, many times higher in the developed countries. So, you've got a tough job. You talked about the complexity of the food industry going all the way
