Europeans are eating worse now than 45 years ago, but agriculture and the right farming policies can promote healthy diets, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

“The EU diet has gradually deteriorated and has become too rich in fats, particularly saturated fats, sugar and cholesterol,” FAO economist Josef Schmidhuber told representatives from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the FAO last week.

The meeting, supported by the Italian government, aimed to facilitate a dialogue between the agriculture and public health sectors, and to identify new policies.

These include supporting primary production and developing fiscal policies to improve people’s diets and to combat obesity and related diseases.

But the general consensus among experts is that there is a lot of work ahead.

Dr Marc Danzon, WHO regional director for Europe, said: “It is a sad fact that obesity affects the poorest parts of society most, and also have long-term consequences for one of its most vulnerable groups of children.

“Everyone must have access to healthy food, and the government policies must support both availability and access in Europe.”

The rates of obesity have risen threefold in many European countries since the 1980s, and the numbers of those affected, particularly children, are on the up.

The condition is already responsible for 2 to 8 per cent of health care costs, and 10 to 13 per cent of deaths in different parts of the European region.

The FAO estimates that there were 852 million undernourished people worldwide between 2000 and 2002, while WHO says that there were 300 million obese adults and 115 million suffering from obesity-related conditions in the developing world.

One solution to the problem would be for people to eat more fruit and vegetables, says Eric Kueneman, chief of the FAO service dealing with crop production.

“FAO is actively promoting fruit and vegetable production for both health and for income-generation for producers,” he said, adding that an ongoing initiative by WHO and FAO to promote fruit and vegetables represented “an exciting avenue for expanded co-operation in the health, education and agriculture sectors".