Moderator

• Stineke Oenema, Executive Secretary, UN Nutrition

Discussants

• Camila Corvalan, Professor, Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology (INTA) - University of Chile
• Carlos Monteiro, Professor of Nutrition and Health, University of Sao Paulo

Synopsis

Join this special ANH2022 session, where two leading figures from Latin America – Carlos Monteiro and Camila Corvalan – will have a free-flowing conversation about how research has shaped policy to challenge the expansion of commercially-driven ultra-processed foods and their significant health effects into the diets and lives of populations across the region.

Drawing on significant experience at the forefronts of these struggles – in Brazil, Chile and the wider region – Carlos and Camila will reflect on the challenges faced along the way and how these were met by communities of research and practice.

This special session will be moderated by Stineke Oenema, Executive Director of UN Nutrition, who will pose the pertinent question: What can other regions around the world learn from these experiences, and how can societies better guide economic development to ensure that nutrition transitions do not jump from diverse traditional foods to homogenised ultra-processed, unhealthy diets.

It promises to be a lively discussion, with opportunities for audience interaction and questions. So please come prepared!

About the speakers

• Stineke Oenema is nutritionist and agricultural economist. She is the first Executive Secretary of UN Nutrition, which was established in 2020. Central to her work is coherent and consistent nutrition policy, advocacy and programming in the UN system at both global and country levels. Before 2020, she was coordinator of the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN), the predecessor of UN Nutrition. From 2003 – 2015 she worked for an internationally operating NGO, being in charge of food and nutrition security policy and program development. Internationally and nationally, she chaired and facilitated several networks and multi-stakeholder groups. She was member of the editorial boards of the UNSCN Nutrition/News and the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch. As member of the first Independent Expert Group, she supported the development of the Global Nutrition Report during its initial years. She briefly worked at Wageningen University. In her early career, she worked for FAO and UNICEF in Ghana, Vietnam and Latin America.

• Camila Corvalan is a surgeon, a Master in Public Health, and a PhD in Nutrition. She is the Director of the Center for Research in Food Environments and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases Associated with Nutrition (CIAPEC), at the Public Health Unit of the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology (INTA) of the University of Chile. CIAPEC is dedicated to the population study of the early nutritional determinants of obesity and associated chronic diseases, particularly metabolic diseases and breast cancer. Their work focuses on carrying out longitudinal epidemiological studies (both observational and intervention) in stages considered critical for the appearance of these diseases, such as pregnancy, childhood, and adolescence, considering various determining factors in both the environment food (set of factors that define population feeding patterns) as individual. CIAPEC is a part of the international network INFORMAS for monitoring food environments, and also carries out policy evaluations such as the Chilean Labeling Law; CIAPEC works in coordination with several governmental bodies.

• Carlos A. Monteiro, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Nutrition and Public Health at the School of Public Health, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he heads the Center for Epidemiological Studies in Health and Nutrition. His research lines include new methods in population nutritional and food intake assessment, epidemiology of all forms of malnutrition, dietary determinants of non-communicable diseases, and food processing and human health. On these subjects, he has published more than 250 journal articles that had more than 19,000 citations in the Web of Science (H index: 68). In the last four years (2018-2021), he was included in the Clarivate Analytics Global Highly Cited Researchers List. Since 2008, he is member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He has served on numerous national and international nutrition expert panels and committees and, since 2010, he is a member of the WHO Nutrition Expert Advisory Group. In 2010, he received the Pan-American Health Organization Abraham Horwitz Award for Excellence in Leadership in Inter-American Health.

French translation:

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