 Many cultures have a sag. It says you are what you eat and this reveals Knowledge of a link between diet and our health But perhaps Benjamin Franklin was closer to the truth when he said that we dig our graves with our teeth Now over the last 100 years nutritionists have Discovered the basic components of a healthy diet that these have been used to formulate various types of dietary advice like You know the food pyramid But unfortunately many people were confused by this and perhaps they were a little resistant to accept the the advice of the first place So consequently many people today still have rather poor diets And that's what I'd like to talk to you about We're digging our graves basically through four different ways. One is simply overeating. I think everybody is familiar with this But this is a quiet epidemic that is major cause of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in both developing and developed countries Another area involves Not consuming micronutrients. These are vitamins and minerals and this is also extremely serious For example a child that does not have sufficient iodide in its diet will develop irreversible brain damage another group of Hazards of the food supply are toxic chemicals For this is a model of acrylamide But it is just one of hundreds of chemicals that could appear in the food supply It caused very serious chronic health problems such as cancer birth defects and organ failure It also I think you might be familiar with these the infectious diseases that can be transmitted through food bacteria viruses and Parasites are the second leading cause of deaths in developing countries and periodically cause havoc in developed countries But there is another aspect to the diet that's quite important Now these two individuals come from Contemporary cultures and one might ask how did one culture become so far advanced compared to the other and part of the answer is due to diet Western civilization arose in an area of the world where there was an abundance of domesticatable plants and animals Particularly wheat and this gave that culture a 10,000 years start now on the contrary in Papua New Guinea, there is very fewer plants and animals that are available for domestication and the possibility of A settled agricultural life is basically impossible There's also another reason that's linked to the diet and that is that We now recognize that health is essential for development rather than the other way around a population that is racked by Malaria or AIDS cannot develop and I think we could also recognize that having a safe and nutritious diet is the foundation for health So because of this link between diet and health and development the World Health Organization Wanted to have a better idea of what people were actually consuming And so in 2006 it analyzed a large database it involved 350 different foods from 180 countries and what we found was patterns We call these consumption cluster diets There are 13 of these all together and the time today doesn't allow me to go into each of these So I will just talk about two of these The first is the Mediterranean diet I think some of you might be familiar with this diet because it's recognized as one of the healthiest diets in the world it is based In large part on the consumption of fruits and vegetables over one kilogram per person per day in addition The consumption of olive oil by this cluster is among the largest in the world Now to their benefit the population that consume this diet have the lowest rates of heart disease and cardiovascular disease And now the other end of the spectrum is What I have called the carnivore diet Now the countries that are involved in this diet are in separate parts of the world But they're nonetheless joined together by their very large consumption of red meat In addition this cluster is also the largest consumer of Sugar so that you could possibly call this The t-rex with a sweet tooth diet So the lessons that you get from just these two diets are perhaps Reduce our consumption of red meat and sugar and maybe increase our consumption of fruits and vegetables But possibly in the future there might be other good advice Many cultures have recognized that certain foods offer health benefits and Modern science is now looking at different foods and food groups to perhaps use these to improve our bodies not just surviving but thriving so Perhaps in the future will be more intelligent or perhaps our bodies will be bigger and stronger or Perhaps this is also possible for us to live longer and lead more active lives So that in the future When we say you are what you eat this may be a positive message rather than a negative one. Thank you very much