Hunger
Hunger is a feeling experienced by
animals when the
glycogen level of the liver falls below a certain point, usually followed by a desire to eat. The usually unpleasant feeling originates in the
hypothalamus and is released through receptors in the liver and stomach. An average nourished human can survive about 50 days without food intake, but only three days without liquids. Hunger can also be applied metaphorically to cravings of other sorts.
The term is commonly used more broadly to refer to cases of widespread
malnutrition or deprivation among populations, usually due to
poverty, political conflicts or instability, or adverse agricultural conditions (
famine).
The term
hungry is commonly used to mean having an
appetite for food or to be ready for a
meal. After a long period without food, the mild sensation of hunger associated with being ready for a meal becomes progressively more severe, until it is acutely
painful. As hunger grows, most living things will experience some internal effects. In humans and other animals, hunger can cause a gurgling sound with a bubbling feeling in the
small intestine (many mistakenly think the
stomach does this), and can shrink the stomach. Prolonged hunger will drive people to eat substances with no nutritional value (such as grass and soil) simply to fill their stomachs, but doing so actually has an adverse effect on energy balance as energy is still required to digest these substances.
Sometimes
hunger is defined as the condition in which an
organism can only use its
protein tissue (e.g. muscles) as the source of
energy, a state which sets in after all
sugars and
fats etc. are used up.
Extreme hunger is a symptom of
diabetes [
1].
Hunger is mediated by several molecular signalling pathways in mammals.
Hormones known to affect hunger include
ghrelin,
leptin, and
Peptide YY3-36 [
2].
In contrast to hunger, which is involuntary,
fasting is the practice of voluntarily not eating for a period of time. A
hunger strike is fasting for the purpose of
nonviolent resistance.
As of 2006, hunger continues to be a worldwide problem. According to the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, "850 million people worldwide were undernourished in 1999 to 2005, the most recent years for which figures are available" and the number of hungry people has recently been increasing. An orange
awareness ribbon is used to raise awareness of hunger in the world.[
3]
There is a wide range of opinions as to why this problem is so persistent. Organizations such as
Food First raise the issue of
food sovereignty and claim that every country on earth (with the possible minor exceptions of some city-states) has sufficient agricultural capacity to feed its own people, but that the "
free trade" economic order associated with such institutions as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank prevent this from happening. At the other end of the spectrum, the World Bank itself claims to be part of the solution to hunger, claiming that the best way for countries to succeed in breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger is to build export-led economies that will give them the financial means to buy foodstuffs on the world market.
Amartya Sen won his
1998 Nobel Prize in part for his work demonstrating that hunger in modern times was not typically the product of a lack of food; rather, hunger usually arose from problems in food distribution networks or from governmental policies in the developing world.
Number of undernourished people (million) in
2001-
2003, according to the
FAO, the following countries had 5 million or more undernourished people [
4]:
| Country | Number of Undernourished (million) | | India | 212.0 |
| China | 150.0 |
| Bangladesh | 43.1 |
| Democratic Republic of Congo | 37.0 |
| Pakistan | 35.2 |
| Ethiopia | 31.5 |
| Tanzania | 16.1 |
| Philippines | 15.2 |
| Brazil | 14.4 |
| Indonesia | 13.8 |
| Vietnam | 13.8 |
| Thailand | 13.4 |
| Nigeria | 11.5 |
| Kenya | 9.7 |
| Sudan | 8.8 |
| Mozambique | 8.3 |
| North Korea | 7.9 |
| Yemen | 7.1 |
| Madagascar | 6.5 |
| Colombia | 5.9 |
| Zimbabwe | 5.7 |
| Mexico | 5.1 |
| Zambia | 5.1 |
| Angola | 5.0 | |
*
Copenhagen Consensus*
Malnutrition*
Famine*
Eating disorder*
United Nations World Food Programme*
Starvation*
Thirst*
Hypothalamus*
Poverty*
Satiety*
World Hunger Map (from
United Nations World Food Programme)
*
Living with Hunger (documentary)
*
The hunger site*
FightHunger.org -- U.N. World Food Programme's global campaign to end child hunger by 2015
*
FAO country statistics*
Freedom from Hunger*
The Borgen Project
