From fighting hunger to building health

Security, trade, and the economy understandably dominated much of the conversation around the BRICS Summit 2026. But for a grouping home to nearly half of humanity, another challenge deserves equal attention: the changing health risks facing its people.The summit has taken an important step in that direction. The launch of the BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle, endorsement of the BRICS Roadmap for the Joint Initiative on Healthy Lifestyle Promotion (2026-2029), and a Compendium of Replicable Best Practices on Healthy Lifestyle signal growing recognition that prevention must move closer to the centre of public policy.This is significant for India during Poshan Maah. Nutrition is no longer only about whether people have enough to eat. Increasingly, it is also about what people eat, how they live, and the diseases that follow.A compressed nutrition transitionBRICS countries are at very different stages of development. Ethiopia continues to struggle with food insecurity and undernutrition. India and Indonesia face persistent maternal and child undernutrition even as obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) rise. China and Brazil have substantially reduced traditional forms of undernutrition but confront growing diet-related disease. In the Gulf, obesity and diabetes are major public-health concerns.Economic growth and urbanisation are rapidly changing how people eat and live. Traditional diets are giving way to more processed and convenience foods. More meals are eaten outside the home or ordered online. Children encounter pervasive food marketing while becoming less physically active.Yet undernutrition, anaemia, and micronutrient deficiencies have not disappeared. Overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease are rising alongside them.India sits at the heart of this transitionOur nutrition policies have rightly focused on hunger, maternal and child nutrition, anaemia, and the first 1,000 days of a child from conception to two years. These priorities remain fundamental. But they are no longer enough.A child poorly nourished in the early years may later grow up surrounded by inexpensive foods high in salt, sugar, and fat, with too little physical activity. Undernutrition in childhood and diabetes or hypertension in adulthood can become parts of the same life story.Much of the West experienced these problems more sequentially: food scarcity and severe nutritional deficiencies declined before obesity and lifestyle diseases became dominant. Emerging economies face a compressed nutrition transition. Yesterday’s problems remain while tomorrow’s diseases have already arrived.We have to fight both at once.From food security to healthy livingThis changes the question food policy must answer. The great challenge of the last century was: can we produce enough food? The challenge of this century is also: can we enable people to eat and live well enough to remain healthy?Agriculture, food, nutrition, and health can no longer work in silos. What farmers grow affects what markets sell. What food companies produce and promote shapes what families buy. And what children eat and the habits they acquire influence their health decades later.The BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle provides an opportunity to build precisely these connections. Its road map places healthy diets, physical activity, traditional food cultures, and evidence-based behavioural change within a common framework. The accompanying compendium of replicable practices can help countries learn from one another rather than repeatedly reinventing solutions.India should use this opportunity not merely to share programmes, but to demonstrate how healthy living can be embedded across food systems, schools, and communities.The next 7,000 daysPoshan Maah offers an opportunity to widen our ambition.The first 1,000 days remain foundational. Nothing should dilute that focus. But India must now pay much greater attention to the next 7,000 days: childhood and adolescence.These are the years when lifelong habits around food, physical activity, sleep, and wellbeing are formed. They offer perhaps our best opportunity to act before today’s children become tomorrow’s patients.Schools can therefore become one of India’s most powerful institutions for preventive health.This does not require another nutrition textbook, subject or examination. Children often already know that vegetables are good, too much sugar is unhealthy, and physical activity matters. Knowing is not the same as doing.Schools should help children practise healthy living: eating diverse foods, drinking water, limiting foods high in salt, sugar and fat, eating mindfully, staying active, sleeping well, and maintaining hygiene. School meals, food regulation, nutrition literacy, physical activity, and family engagement should become parts of one preventive-health strategy.India’s fight against hunger and malnutrition is unfinished. But another challenge has arrived alongside it.The BRICS Summit has provided a useful framework for responding to both. The task now is to turn its Healthy Lifestyle Mission and Roadmap into action.Poshan must increasingly mean nourishing early, building healthy habits early, and preventing disease early. For India — and much of the BRICS world — the next frontier is not simply enough food. It is enabling people to eat well, live well and remain healthy throughout life.Pawan Agarwal is a former CEO of the FSSAI and is the founder & CEO of the Food Future Foundation