September 28, 2017
UNC Anthropology Professor, Dr. Amanda Thompson received funding for her grant, “Water, Food, and the Triple Burden of Disease in the Galapagos, Ecuador” from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health. I am leading the project which includes colleagues from Public Health (Drs. Peggy Bentley and Jill Stewart) and from the University of San Francisco Quito (Drs. Enrique Teran, Jaime Ocampo and Graham Pluck).
In low and middle income countries, increasing obesity and cardiometabolic disease exist alongside persistent undernutrition and infectious disease morbidity due to the heterogeneity in diets, lifestyles, and disease burdens that accompany economic development. An improved understanding of the pathways linking the water and food exposures to the dual burden of under- and over-nutrition is critical for identifying the effects of changing environments on human health and developing successful interventions for reducing the global burden of obesity, cardiometabolic disease and persistent undernutiriton.
