ABSTRACT
The ‘Nutrition Transition’, as was true for the Demographic and Epidemiological Transitions, was a term coined by an individual researcher, who then proceeded to refine and extend the concept. The Nutrition Transition is a concept mapped by Barry Popkin, an American economist and epidemiologist, and current from the 1990s. It describes a historical pattern of change in diet and physical activity witnessed particularly in the twentieth century across the world, as people became richer. 1 In over two decades of work, studying about half the planet’s populations, Popkin and colleagues have suggested that as societies modernise they converge towards a particular dietary configuration, one which is high in saturated fats, sugar and refined foods but low in fibre, often termed the ‘Western diet’.
