IDF World Dairy Summit 2015 in Vilnius, Lithuania 20 – 24 September. The main theme of this year’s Summit – Closing the Nutritional Gap with Sustainable Dairy – reflects the IDF’s commitment towards ensuring global nutrition security and food sustainability. The Summit has attracted over 1200 dairy producers, farmers, scientists, government officials and other sector professionals from more than 50 countries across the globe.
Dr. Jeremy Hill, the President of IDF, emphasised that the theme of this year’s Summit corresponds to one of the most important issues the world is facing today. “The nutritional gap affects both the wealthy and the poor. It is manifest through poor nutrition in the diseases of affluence, such as obesity and diabetes, and of poverty, such as stunting. In both cases a lack of a balanced diet through inadequate advice, poor choices or limited access can have devastating effects on the individual, on the family and on society,” says the President of IDF.
Hill is convinced that “Dairy has an important role to play in enriching the nutritional credentials of diets and is just as important in those countries with the over feeding and under nutrition (too many calories and too few nutrients) as it is in those with under feeding and under nutrition (too few calories and too few nutrients).”
“Unfortunately consumers’ understanding of nutrition and health and the role of food and diets is not as advanced as it needs to be and particularly in a world where we cannot afford to squander our food production systems, our food and our diets on naive policies and advice. We need to move away from the reductionist view of nutrition as the sum of the individual food components and consider the complex way multiple food components act within complex diets and individual lifestyles,” Dr. Hill notes.
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