The challenges of food and human nutrition are closely connected to those of world health. If hunger and malnutrition are increasing dramatically all over the world, statistics from the FAO, WHO and the World Bank also tell us that another parallel process linked to food is increasing inexorably and stealthily, and this is the number of people who are overweight and obese. Considered to be real epidemics, these problems are showing up mainly amongst the younger generations and especially in the cities. The latest WHO statistics indicate that by 2015 there may be about 700 million obese people in the world. This does not even exclude the southern Mediterranean countries and the regions whose dietary traditions constitute the last defence against the dietary shift taking place.