**Author details**

*Lifestyle and Epidemiology - The Double Burden of Poverty and Cardiovascular Diseases...* 

processed foods and fat [24]. Can the average township person afford this? Locally available foods e.g., seasonal fruits, wild vegetables, peanut butter and insects are all good for heart health and should be widely promoted and made easily available.

*The current interventions and their effect on health including heart health depending on whether one is rich* 

Health is an asset. The conditions in which we are born, grow, live and work affect our health. Countries do not necessarily need wealth to gain health e.g. Sri Lanka had a maternal mortality rate of 2% in the 1930s not comparable to any country today [34]. Sri Lanka reduced maternal mortality to 0.6% today, spending less each year as they learnt what worked and did not work [34]. Similarly, countries in SSA could adapt their approach through first identification of health as asset and then investing in preventive and promotive health while still ensuring efficacy and efficiency of curative services. Addressing the different forms of poverty, utilising a

systems thinking lens, could contribute to healthier societies.

**12**

**16. Conclusion**

**Figure 5.**

*or poor.*

Janet Michel1,2\* and Marcel Tanner2,3

1 Insel University Hospital, University of Bern, Switzerland

2 Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), Basel, Switzerland

3 University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

\*Address all correspondence to: janetmichel71@gmail.com

© 2021 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
