The majority of Russians were found to be overweight: the main reasons were named
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Russians are catastrophically undernourished in vegetables, fruits, meat and poultry, but they consume three times more sugar and salt than normal. So it is not surprising that, according to the latest data, 62% of the country’s adult population are overweight or already obese. But soon the country will introduce mass monitoring of the population’s nutrition. Experts spoke about plans to lose weight and increase the nutritional value of the diet.
“Even in our audience, every third person is overweight,” said Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Scientific Director of the Federal Research Center for Nutrition and Biotechnology Viktor Tutelyan during the opening of the XVIII All-Russian Congress with international participation “Nutrition and Dietetics for the Health of the Russian Population.”
However, nutritional monitoring is already partially being carried out, at least in a group of schoolchildren in grades 1–4. As the head of Rospotrebnadzor Anna Popova said, today, with school breakfasts, students in grades 1–4 receive 25% of the daily requirement of vitamins and minerals. In addition, over the past two years, the prevalence of the habit of adding salt to food among primary schoolchildren has decreased to 10.9 per 100 people from 15.2 per 100. And 16.1 out of a hundred students add 3 or more tablespoons of sugar to drinks, not 21.4 out of 100, as it was in 2021. According to Popova, nutrition monitoring will soon be extended to other age groups of schoolchildren and pregnant women. And Victor Tutelyan talks about plans to monitor the nutrition of the entire population of the country, for which special centers have already begun to be created in the regions: “Epidemiological monitoring of the population’s nutrition is the key to the system for preserving the health of the nation. Therefore, regional centers for monitoring and optimizing the nutrition of the population are being created in all constituent entities of the Russian Federation. Our goal is to use our raw material base and national nutritional characteristics to reach a level that will provide people with energy and all the necessary nutritional compounds.”
However, as Academician Tutelyan admits, science has not yet established the norms of physiological needs for micro- and macronutrients: “We still don’t know how much, who needs it and when it is necessary for those 200–300 compounds that we regularly receive from food. But it is known that with their deficiency, nutritional diseases, obesity, and metabolic syndrome develop.”
Experts noted that today nutrition-related diseases (those that appear due to poor diet) are the cause of 27% of deaths in Russia. Recent data shows that 63% of men and 60% of women in our country are overweight and obese.
What worries nutrition experts most is that Russians are undernourished on vegetables (26% less than normal), fruits (23% less), dairy products (13% less), meat and poultry (20% less). But sugar, confectionery, fat-containing and sausage products are consumed threefold!
Among the main nutritional challenges, Academician Tutelyan names high caloric intake, which leads to a large number of overweight people, as well as a deficiency of vitamins and micronutrients. For vitamin D and calcium alone, Russians’ needs are met by 80%, but for all other useful substances we do not even reach 50% (for vitamins A and C, for example, below 10%).
The third challenge is excess salt (with a norm of 5 g per day, we eat up to 15). But it is well known that adding salt to food sharply increases the risks of arterial hypertension and death from cardiovascular diseases, doctors remind.
The fourth challenge is that Russians eat on average less than 100 g of fruits and berries per day, which means they do not receive enough vitamins and fiber.
Among the main nutrition trends of the future, Viktor Tutelyan names the production of fortified and specialized food products (everything that we don’t need is removed from such products, and what we need is added), the search for non-traditional food sources (for example, insects), synthetic biology (for example, development is underway artificial meat), as well as personalization of nutrition using digital nutrition. In addition, new technologies are being sought to ensure maximum food safety. Due to the increasing availability of seafood, the phytotoxins they may contain are becoming relevant, scientists say.
“We can do everything ourselves, in the right quantities, but nutritionists must set clear goals for the industry,” says Tutelyan.
“We are provided with agricultural products quantitatively, but in the last three years there has been a trend towards increasing the production of quality products,” says RAS academician Viktor Khlystun.
Meanwhile, the representative of the Federal Service for Control of Alcohol and Tobacco Markets, Dmitry Burtsev, suggested not to forget about healthy alcoholic drinks: “Red wine was used during the Great Patriotic War to restore soldiers in hospitals, we also need to think about this topic. Beer in Germany is generally the second bread. And our Russian vodka is generally our heritage; it should not be forgotten. It is necessary to establish how and in what quantities these useful products can be consumed.”
Newspaper headline:
Russians’ food will be weighed, measured and counted
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