F Food and health
See how the four parts of Food and health fit together, from measuring hunger and disease to food systems, stakeholders and future solutions, and which case studies and concepts carry the option.
- IB Geography
- SL and HL
What F covers
From the subject guide: what you need to know and be able to do.
Option: how food and health are measured, food systems, the spread of disease and who acts on them.
4 subtopics in Food and health
Each one has its own page once something is published for it.
- F.1Measuring food and health81 questions · notes
- F.2Food systems and spread of diseases83 questions · notes
- F.3Stakeholders in food and health74 questions · notes
- F.4Future health and food security and sustainability81 questions · notes
An overview of F Food and health
Food and health studies how well people are fed and how healthy they are, why both vary so much between and within places, and what could improve them. The two are closely linked: what people eat shapes the diseases they suffer, and illness, poverty and conflict affect whether food reaches the people who need it. In 2025 about 645 million people were undernourished, while one adult in six was living with obesity.
Questions that frame the option
The option follows four lines of geographical inquiry. The first asks how disparities in food and health between places can be measured, and how well each measure captures them. The second asks how physical and human processes change food production and consumption, and how diseases arise and spread. The third asks which stakeholders hold power over diets and health, from global agencies to the members of one household. The fourth asks what futures are possible for sustainable agriculture and better health, and who each possible solution would help.
These inquiries lead to real questions that geographers try to answer with evidence:
Why did adult obesity in Mexico rise from 8.7% in 1980 to 37.4% in 2024, while one child under 5 in eight was still stunted?
Why did Bangladesh record 1,705 deaths from dengue in 2023, more than nine times as many as in the outbreak of 2019?
Why was famine confirmed in Zamzam camp in Sudan in August 2024, when the trigger was war rather than drought?
Why did the United States, ranked the best-prepared country for a pandemic in 2019, have about 300 excess deaths per 100,000 people from COVID-19 by the end of 2021, against about 15 in South Korea?
Why did Brazil leave the FAO Hunger Map in 2014, return to it after 2018 and fall below its threshold again by 2024?
What the option covers
The option has four subtopics. The first two describe and explain patterns of food and disease; the last two examine who has power over them and what could change them.
Subtopic | Main question | Case study and detailed examples |
|---|---|---|
F.1 Measuring food and health | How can disparities in food, nutrition and health be measured, and how do diets and causes of death change with development? | Case study: Mexico’s nutrition and epidemiological transitions, with its 2014 tax on sugary drinks. Examples: the double burden in India and Egypt, Japan’s low-calorie diet, the double burden of disease in South Africa, life expectancy gaps for Indigenous Australians and in Glasgow |
F.2 Food systems and spread of diseases | How efficient and sustainable are different food systems, and how do innovations and diseases diffuse? | Case study: dengue in Bangladesh, 2023 (vector-borne). Detailed example: cholera in Yemen, 2016–2021 (water-borne). Examples: Philippine rice and Turkish greenhouses, Almería tomatoes, the Green Revolution in Punjab, Bt cotton in India, Ebola in West Africa, cholera in Haiti |
F.3 Stakeholders in food and health | Which stakeholders have power over diets and health, and what makes a famine severe? | Case study: famine in Sudan, 2023–2025. Examples: Somalia 2011, Gaza 2025, Ethiopia 1984, Bengal 1943; India’s Public Distribution System, the UK sugar levy, Chile’s labelling law, Nestlé’s Maggi noodles in India, the Nestlé boycott, gender and “missing women” |
F.4 Future health and food security and sustainability | Which solutions to food insecurity and disease work, for whom, and how should pandemics be managed? | Case study: COVID-19, comparing South Korea, New Zealand, the USA and Peru. Detailed example: Brazil’s Fome Zero and Bolsa Família. Examples: Ethiopia’s safety net, France’s 2016 food waste law, Golden Rice, Singapore’s “30 by 30”, cultivated meat, Cuba’s primary care |
Several places reappear from different angles. Mexico is a nutrition transition in the first subtopic and a sugar tax passed against industry opposition in the third; Bt cotton in India is a fast diffusion in the second and a debate about GMOs in the fourth; Yemen’s cholera and Sudan’s famine both show conflict destroying the systems that keep people fed and healthy.
How the subtopics connect
The concept map shows the main links. The indicators of the first subtopic describe patterns, and the nutrition transition and epidemiological transition explain them over time: as incomes rise and societies urbanise, diets shift towards sugar, fat and processed food, and the main causes of death shift from infections to non-communicable diseases. The second subtopic explains the processes behind these patterns, from the energy and water used by farms to the diffusion of crops and pathogens. The third shows that stakeholders with power shape those processes, and the fourth compares the futures they could choose.
The links between food and health run in both directions. The nutrition transition feeds the epidemiological transition, because diets high in sugar and fat raise rates of diabetes and heart disease; undernutrition weakens immunity, so that in Sudan most famine deaths came from measles, malaria and cholera combined with hunger. A health crisis can also become a food crisis: lost incomes during COVID-19 pushed undernourishment in Brazil back above the Hunger Map threshold in 2021.
Key concepts in Food and health
The four key concepts appear across the option, together with the two concepts that belong to it in particular: diffusion and barriers, and sustainability.
Concept | How it appears in the option |
|---|---|
Place | The same indicator gives very different values for Somalia, Mexico and Japan, and for rich and poor groups inside each; dengue strikes hardest in a dense, fast-growing megacity such as Dhaka. |
Process | The nutrition and epidemiological transitions, farm systems of inputs, stores and outputs, and the transmission of malaria, dengue and cholera. |
Power | UN agencies, governments, NGOs, foundations and agribusiness firms shape what people eat and which diseases are funded; armed groups withheld food in Sudan; women often control less land and income than men. |
Possibility | Solutions compared by pillar of food security, new technologies such as GMOs and vertical farms, and lessons for the next pandemic, each with uncertain results. |
Diffusion and barriers | Expansion and relocation diffusion of high-yielding seeds and of diseases, slowed by physical, economic and political barriers. |
Sustainability | Energy ratios and water footprints of food systems, food loss and waste, and whether production can be raised without degrading soil and water. |
Many of the option’s ideas begin in the core. Food security and the water–food–energy nexus belong to the unit on resource consumption, where changing diets in middle-income countries are outlined and the debate between Malthusian theory and Boserup’s theory frames whether food supply can keep pace with demand.
The demographic transition model runs alongside the epidemiological transition stage by stage, and an ageing population raises the burden of dementia and heart disease. Global climate change is shifting the range of vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes and altitudes. The option also meets Urban environments, where informal settlements and food deserts shape diets and disease, and Freshwater, where safe water and sanitation limit the spread of water-borne disease.
How SL and HL differ
Food and health is one of seven options. SL students choose two options and HL students choose three, so an HL student may take Food and health alongside two others while an SL student takes it with one. The content of the option is identical at both levels: every subtopic, case study and skill is studied in the same depth, and nothing on the option’s pages is HL only.
Both levels also answer the same Paper 1 question on Food and health, marked with the same markbands. The difference between the levels lies in how many options are studied and in the HL extension units, not in what is expected within this option.
Assessment
Food and health is examined in Paper 1. For each option studied there is a structured question built on a stimulus, worth 10 marks, followed by one extended answer worth 10 marks, chosen from two. The structured question usually moves from one-mark readings of the stimulus, through a two-mark outline, to two three-mark explanations.
Stimuli are often a choropleth map of hunger or disease, a scatter graph of income against a health indicator, a table of indicators for several countries, an epidemic curve or a bar chart of water footprints. Short questions ask candidates to read a value with its unit, work out a difference, outline a limitation of an indicator or explain two barriers to diffusion.
Extended questions tend to pair a process theme, such as the factors behind the incidence of a vector-borne disease, with a management theme, such as the effectiveness of international action against a pandemic or the factors that make a famine severe. The geographical skills of the option are graphical: choropleths, scatter graphs, transition graphs, diffusion maps and development diamonds.
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