Foodcare is a project that wants to answer to the youth's needs to face eating disorders and their active involvement to face the climate change.
Eating disorders and obesity on one hand side and climate change on the other are main current challenges that concern us all, all around the world and all age groups - on societal level and possibly personal level (e.g. obesity increases the risk of developing more than a dozen types of cancer as a new study from the University of Bergen (UiB) reveals. It also points out that obesity is the cause of approximately 500,000 new cancer cases each year - a number that is expected to grow as obesity rates continue to increase.)
On a long term, this has impact on health system, on individuals' employability and even genes or offsprings. At the same time, 2021, 1% of the global population (appr. 79 million) claimed to be vegan showing a high growth rate that could result in 10 people applying this life style within the next 10 years (Revealing Vegan Statistics: Veganism Is On The Rise In 2022), 5% are estimated to follow plant-based meal diets, 6% low carb and ketogenic – the latter with the highest growth rate lately (2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/993725/consumer-diet-share-us/).
Changing one’s eating order helps humans adapt to a future-oriened life style. According to 2018 WHO data, 650 mio. people were obese, 1 billion 9 million people overweight all over the world. The rate of over 45% in 26 of the 28 OECD member countries reveals the spread of the issue. In Spain, 21.6% of adults are obese, especially women aged ≥50 years.
Raising awareness and applying new diets also can have impact on climate change. According to studies, farms cause 14.5 % of total greenhouse gas emission in the world. This number equals to total emissions of all vehicles (cars, trains, ships and planes) we see. According to experts at Cambridge University, 10% decline in emission equals to the same impact as withdrawing nearly 8 million cars from traffic in England. 37 scientists from different countries with various expertise from agriculture to food health, climate change to nutrition gather under EAT-Lancet Commission to work on the most sustainable and healthiest food consumption for both, people and the world.
According to data gathered by studies done for two years and published in Lancet magazine, the most prominent feature of newly found diet has the least amount of meat and dairy consumption. According to this diet, the amount of red meat you can eat is limited to one hamburger once a week or one big steak once a month.
Finally, our eating habits go very often hand in hand with food waste. It belongs to today’s important issues we need to solve since leftover food waste comes with energy waste, energy used for each sold product. According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 1/3rd of total food produced every year goes into the bin. Avoiding/using leftover food is
considerably important to prevent food waste. Only if people threw less food away and waste be avoided in e.g. the catering sector, 360 billion metric tons emission could be avoided.