Barry Popkin

Last updated
Barry Michael Popkin
Born (1944-05-23) May 23, 1944 (age 79)
Superior, Wisconsin
Alma mater Cornell University, University of Wisconsin
Known for Nutrition transition
SpouseAnne-Linda Furstenberg (d. 2002)
ChildrenOne son
Scientific career
FieldsEconomics, nutrition epidemiology [1]
Institutions University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thesis Vitamin A deficiency in the Philippines: the development and analysis of alternative interventions  (1974)
Doctoral advisor David Call, Michael Latham
Other academic advisorsRalph Andreano, Lee Hansen, Richard Easterlin, David Call, Daniel Sisler

Barry Michael Popkin (born May 23, 1944) [2] is an American nutrition and obesity researcher at the Carolina Population Center and the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition (as well as Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of Global Nutrition) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, where he is the director of the Global Food Research Program. He developed the concept of "nutrition transition". He is the author of over 650 journal articles and a book, The World is Fat, [3] translated into a dozen languages.

Contents

Early life and education

Popkin was born in 1944 and grew up in Superior, Wisconsin; neither of his parents had a college education. Popkin describes the food he ate in Superior as "...typical of the way most Americans handled food in the first half of the 20th century." [1] He attended the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1967. He spent the 1965-66 year in India living partly in a squatter area and partly at Delhi University. After which he spent one year doing graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1968, he returned to the University of Wisconsin, and received his MS from there one year later. After a period of civil rights work, he worked at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty for a year and then in 1972 moved to Boston to work. Then he began to work at Cornell University in the fall of 1972 and began his thesis work in Jan 1973. In July 1974, he received his PhD in agricultural economics from Cornell University. [3]

Career

From 1971 to 1972 Popkin worked as a research economist at the Institute for Research in Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. From 1974 to 1976 Popkin was a visiting associate professor with the Rockefeller Foundation in Manila, Philippines. He joined UNC-Chapel Hill's faculty in 1977 and became the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition there in 2011. [4]

Research

Popkin did extensive research from 1971 to the early 1980s on both hunger in America and around the world. He developed with Bob Evenson the Laguna Household Surveys and created the Bicol Multipurpose Survey while living in the Philippines and focused much of his attention there on women, work and the relationship of these activities to maternal and child health. He subsequently returned to the US and worked for a decade on maternal and child nutrition research, including initiating the Cebu Longitudinal Household Health and Nutrition Survey with two economics colleagues. [5] He started the China Health and Nutrition Survey in the late 1980s and it was out of this experience that he wrote a series of papers which created the concept of the nutrition transition. [6] [1] Much of his subsequent research globally has been on the transitions in the way we eat, drink and move and how the most recent stage of this transition has created in regions and countries throughout the globe many shifted toward increased obesity and related noncommunicable diseases and many adverse economic consequences. For many years he was writing and talking about this transition and it took a Bellagio conference he held in 2001 to convince leading scholars globally that low and middle income countries were going through this rapid shift toward a pattern of diet and activity linked with rapid shifts toward obesity.[ citation needed ]

He also was the first author to identify along with co-author Colleen Doak the double burden of malnutrition in a series of papers first published in 2000. He also published papers linking obesity and stunting first and this led to many others studying both concepts.

He was a co-author on a widely cited 2004 paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which speculated that high fructose corn syrup-containing beverages may uniquely contribute to obesity. [7] [8] In his research, he shows how increasing access to media and exposure to advertising, a powerful food industry, the rise of Wal-Mart like shopping centers, and a dramatic decline in physical activity are clashing with millions of years of human evolution, creating a world of overweight people with debilitating health problems such as diabetes. Ultimately, Popkin contends that widespread obesity is less a result of poor individual dietary choices than about a hi-tech, interconnected world in which governments and multinational corporations have extraordinary power to shape our everyday lives and environments. [9] Popkin also conducted the China Health and Nutrition Survey, and has conducted other surveys in countries such as Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and the United Arab Emirates. [1] He was a member of the G-7 small team of economists who worked in 1991 on working to help transform the Russia economy. Then he helped to create a new poverty line for Russia and also initiated the ongoing Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. [1] Popkin was the chair of a committee of experts that published a report on the health effects of food deserts in 2009. They found that farmer's markets and supermarkets did not have a noticeable effect in 'so-called' food deseerts. . [10]

In the early 2010s he and colleagues led a project to determine the calorie and nutrient content of popular foods in the United States, or, as Popkin describes it, "mapping the food genome." [11] In 2014, Popkin et al. published a study in which the authors reported that fast food consumption was not the sole contributor to childhood obesity, and that Western diets in general might be more strongly associated with obesity than fast food consumption alone. [12] Regarding this study, Popkin told the Winston-Salem Chronicle that "Eating fast foods is just one behavior that results from those poor eating habits. Just because children who eat more fast food are the most likely to become obese does not prove that calories from fast foods bear the brunt of the blame." [13] Another 2014 study led by Popkin found that as a result of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation Pledge, food companies sold about 6.4 trillion fewer calories in 2012 than they did in 2007. [14] [15] But his team showed they were losing food markets to private labels and did not change their own behavior for what they produced.

More recently he worked with the Mexican government on a number of panels and commissions related to creating a healthier diet and preventing increased obesity and diabetes. He is currently working with Mexican colleagues to evaluate the Mexican sugar-sweetened beverage and nonessential food taxes to learn how they impact food purchasing patterns and ultimately diet and health. [16] He is working with a number of countries in Asia and Latin America on related large-scale activities to help reduce the risks of poor diets and obesity.

His Global Food Research Program at UNC has been done in collaboration with Professors Shu Wen Ng and Lindsey Smith Taillie. Together they are working in a set of countries around the world in addition to Mexico on the design and evaluation and also research support for in-country research collaborators on policy advocacy. Those countries include Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Jamaica and Barbados.

As part of an evaluation fund he leads, they are working with the Chilean government and colleagues at the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology and the Chronicas group at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima.[ citation needed ]

Nutrition transition

The concept of nutrition transition, referring to the changes in diet in the Western world from high-fiber diets to those based on more processed foods containing more fat and sugar, was first proposed by Popkin in 1993. [17] Since he proposed the concept, Popkin has published studies about the nutrition transition and its effects in the developing world, [18] as well as in Brazil. [19]

Views

In 2013, Popkin argued that smoothies are "the new danger" due to the large quantities of fructose they contain. [20] He is also a critic of the soft drink industry. He has expressed strong support for soda taxes, and has compared them to existing taxes on tobacco. [21] When several large beverage companies promised to reduce soda consumption in 2014, Popkin said this was merely an attempt to pass off already declining soda sales as an effort to combat obesity. [22] In the past decade after he organized a bellagio conference on large-scale regulatory and fiscal options for addressing global obesity much of his energy has been working on regulatory options such as food labeling and marketing control in many countries(e.g. Chile), fiscal actions around SSB and other ultra-processed food taxes(e.g. Mexico), and consulting with dozens of countries on such actions.

The World is Fat

In 2009, Popkin's book The World is Fat was published by Avery Publishing. In the book, Popkin contends that the rising rates of obesity around the world are due to several different factors, including globalization, technology, and the fact that people now eat more often and in more places than they did before. [23] He also cites the fact that humans have a tendency to enjoy eating foods containing large amounts of sugar and fat as another contributor to the obesity epidemic. [24]

The book was described by Fuchsia Dunlop as "a concise, lucid overview of how the human diet has gone awry in the last half-century." [24]

Personal life

Popkin was a partner of Anne-Linda Furstenberg, a professor of social work at UNC-Chapel Hill for 16 years, until she died in 2002. [25] With a previous wife he had a son. [26] He is currently a partner of Cay Stratton, formerly advisor to the UK government on youth and young adult employment and currently senior fellow at MDC, a nonprofit focusing on southern poverty issues. [27]

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Junk food</span> Unhealthy food high in sugar or fat calories

"Junk food" is a term used to describe food that is high in calories from sugar and/or fat, and possibly sodium, but with little dietary fiber, protein, vitamins, minerals, or other important forms of nutritional value. It is also known as HFSS food. The term junk food is a pejorative dating back to the 1950s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fad diet</span> Popular diet with claims not supported by science

A fad diet is a diet that is popular, generally only for a short time, similar to fads in fashion, without being a standard dietary recommendation, and often making pseudoscientific or unreasonable claims for fast weight loss or health improvements. Fad diets are usually not supported by clinical research and their health recommendations are not peer-reviewed, thus they often make unsubstantiated statements about health and disease.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Healthy diet</span> Type of diet

A healthy diet is a diet that maintains or improves overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential nutrition: fluid, macronutrients such as protein, micronutrients such as vitamins, and adequate fibre and food energy.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Taubes</span> Science writer, born 1956

Gary Taubes is an American journalist, writer, and low-carbohydrate / high-fat (LCHF) diet advocate. His central claim is that carbohydrates, especially sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, overstimulate the secretion of insulin, causing the body to store fat in fat cells and the liver, and that it is primarily a high level of dietary carbohydrate consumption that accounts for obesity and other metabolic syndrome conditions. He is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987); Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993); Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), titled The Diet Delusion (2008) in the UK and Australia; Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (2010); The Case Against Sugar (2016); and The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating (2020). Taubes's work often goes against accepted scientific, governmental, and popular tenets such as that obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little and that excessive consumption of fat, especially saturated fat in animal products, leads to cardiovascular disease.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western pattern diet</span> Modern dietary pattern

The Western pattern diet is a modern dietary pattern that is generally characterized by high intakes of pre-packaged foods, refined grains, red meat, processed meat, high-sugar drinks, candy and sweets, fried foods, industrially produced animal products, butter and other high-fat dairy products, eggs, potatoes, corn, and low intakes of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, pasture-raised animal products, fish, nuts, and seeds.

Nutrition transition is the shift in dietary consumption and energy expenditure that coincides with economic, demographic, and epidemiological changes. Specifically the term is used for the transition of developing countries from traditional diets high in cereal and fiber to more Western-pattern diets high in sugars, fat, and animal-source food.

Obesity in Mexico is a relatively recent phenomenon, having been widespread since the 1980s with the introduction of processed food into much of the Mexican food market. Prior to that, dietary issues were limited to under and malnutrition, which is still a problem in various parts of the country. Following trends already ongoing in other parts of the world, Mexicans have been foregoing the traditional Mexican diet high in whole grains, fruits, legumes and vegetables in favor of a diet with more animal products and processed foods. It has seen dietary energy intake and rates of overweight and obese people rise with seven out of ten at least overweight and a third clinically obese.

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While genetic influences are important to understanding obesity, they cannot explain the current dramatic increase seen within specific countries or globally. It is accepted that calorie consumption in excess of calorie expenditure leads to obesity; however, what has caused shifts in these two factors on a global scale is much debated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Obesity in China</span> Overview of obesity in the People’s Republic of China

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of fast food</span> Overview about the criticism of fast food

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Added sugar</span> Caloric sweeteners added to food and beverages

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sweetened beverage</span> Type of beverage

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Barry Popkin PhD". University of North Carolina Chapel Hill . Retrieved 10 August 2013.
  2. ↑ "Barry Popkin". Library of Congress Name Authority File. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
  3. 1 2 "Faculty Fellows — UNC Carolina Population Center". unc.edu.
  4. ↑ "Popkin named Kenan Professor". unc.edu. 11 June 2011.
  5. ↑ Popkin's Curriculum Vitae
  6. ↑ Ng, Brady (9 January 2017). "Obesity: the big, fat problem with Chinese cities". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
  7. ↑ Bray, George A.; Nielsen, Samara Joy (2004). "Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity". American Journal of Clinical Nutrition . 79 (4): 537–543. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/79.4.537 . PMID   15051594 . Retrieved 7 August 2013.
  8. ↑ Weise, Elizabeth (8 December 2008). "New data: High-fructose corn syrup no worse than sugar". USA Today . Retrieved 29 December 2013.
  9. ↑ "Barry Popkin". UNC-TV. Archived from the original on 3 July 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2013.
  10. ↑ Charles, Dan (9 May 2012). "What Will Make The Food Desert Bloom?". NPR. Retrieved 14 December 2014.
  11. ↑ Jalonick, Mary Clare (19 May 2013). "What do we eat? New food map will tell us". Associated Press. Archived from the original on 1 February 2014. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  12. ↑ Poti, J. M.; Duffey, K. J.; Popkin, B. M. (2013). "The association of fast food consumption with poor dietary outcomes and obesity among children: Is it the fast food or the remainder of the diet?". American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 99 (1): 162–171. doi:10.3945/ajcn.113.071928. PMC   3862453 . PMID   24153348.
  13. ↑ "Fast Food Only Part of the Problem". Winston-Salem Chronicle . 23 January 2014. Retrieved 10 February 2014.
  14. ↑ Ng, Shu Wen; Slining, Meghan M.; Popkin, Barry M. (October 2014). "The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation Pledge". American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 47 (4): 508–519. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2014.05.029. PMC   4171694 . PMID   25240967.
  15. ↑ Khan, Amir (17 September 2014). "6.4 Trillion Calories Cut From Unhealthy Grocery Store Foods". U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved 4 February 2015.
  16. ↑ Gallucci, Maria (11 January 2015). "As Mexico's Sugary Drink Tax Turns 1 Year Old, US Health Proponents Hope It Can Sway American Voters". International Business Times. Retrieved 11 January 2015.
  17. ↑ Nutritional Patterns and Transitions
  18. ↑ Popkin, Barry M. (March 2001). "The Nutrition Transition and Obesity in the Developing World". Journal of Nutrition . 131 (3): 871–3S. doi: 10.1093/jn/131.3.871S . PMID   11238777.
  19. ↑ Monteiro, C. A.; Mondini, L.; De Souza, A. L.; Popkin, B. M. (1995). "The nutrition transition in Brazil". European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 49 (2): 105–113. PMID   7743983.
  20. ↑ Boseley, Sarah (6 September 2013). "Smoothies and fruit juices are a new risk to health, US scientists warn". The Guardian . Retrieved 18 September 2013.
  21. ↑ "Scientists target soda as main cause of obesity". NBC News . Associated Press. 5 March 2006. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  22. ↑ Neporent, Liz (24 September 2014). "Soda Calorie Reduction Promise Falls Flat With Consumer Groups". ABC News. Retrieved 31 January 2015.
  23. ↑ Hobson, Katherine (9 January 2009). "Barry Popkin: Why the World Is Fat". U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  24. 1 2 Dunlop, Fuchsia (25 January 2009). "Industrial Food". Washington Post. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  25. ↑ "Paid Notice: Deaths". New York Times. 27 January 2002. Retrieved 15 November 2014.
  26. ↑ Popkin, Barry (2008). The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products that are Fattening the Human Race. Penguin. p. 183. ISBN   9781583333136.
  27. ↑ "Staff". MDC. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
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