“A Greedy Man in a Hungry World”: does hunger lead to depression and anxiety?”

Abstract

We live in a divided world with reasoning for depression and anxiety (Figure 1). I say something rude -because it touches me emotionallywhile on the other side of the world in the US children are doing suicide because they are obese (BMI> 30) [1], at the same time, a huge number of children are dying mainly in East Africa in the subSaharan region as a result of hunger in combination with war. These scientific facts support my perception that we live in a divided, torn "Hunger-Obesity" world, and although the phenomenon of hunger has been less common since the 1990s, it seems as if people in developed countries have become emotionally insensitive to this phenomenon because this phenomenon is far away from the Industrialized Western World or Developed countries. In 1991, only a select number of developing countries had undernourishment levels <5%. In 2015, many countries achieved this, particularly across Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa [2]. United Nations warned as many as 1.4 million children could die of starvation in the coming months [4]. While at this time for the victims of this famine food supply is a top priority, I raise in this editorial the scientific question: “whether hunger distress is accompanied with depression and anxiety and whether at all biomarkers for human starvation/hunger stress exist”. These issues are important to answer in order to help traumatized victims during the famine, not solely with food, but with mental support or afterwards during their nutritional recovery period. If we see figure 2 which is a global map for “national happiness rankings” (a rough indicator for the parameters depression & anxiety) how this “emotion” is distributed on our planet, it seems that relatively most unhappy people live at the African continent which is stroke by famine and war. Brutal conflicts in South Sudan, Yemen and Nigeria have driven millions of people from their homes and left millions more in need of emergency food. [3].