Globesity: Should We Start Worrying?
The September 2007 issue of Scientific American was a special on Diet, Health and Food Supply. It contains a multitude of insightful pieces on the most pressing food and health related issues facing our world today.
One such article is entitled “The World is Fat” by Barry M. Popkin. This article should serve as a red alert to the true impact of obesity across the world.
Here is a summary of this piece:
- For most developing nations, obesity is a now more serious threat than hunger. Worldwide, more than 1.3 billion people are overweight, while only about 800 million are underweight. These figures are diverging rapidly.
- Even poverty-stricken nations such as Nigeria and Uganda are facing high obesity rates
- People in developing worlds are consuming more caloric sweeteners, vegetable oils and animal-source foods. Poorer nations have also experienced an influx of technology that brings activity to a grinding halt.
Obesity: A Tale of 4 Nations:
Mexico:
- In 1989, fewer than 10% of Mexicans were overweight. In 2006, that number skyrocketed to 69%!
- Almost 1 in 7 Mexican adults have type 2 diabetes – now that nations number 1 killer.
Brazil:
- Percentage of overweight adults (1975): 20%
- Percentage of overweight adults (1997): 36.7% (Likely much higher today)
Egypt:
- Percentage of overweight/obese adults (1998): 59.1% (Again, likely higher today)
- Urban woman are especially prone to overweight due to adopting modern habits such as watching T.V.
China:
- Percentage of overweight/obese adults (1991): 12.9%
- Percentage of overweight/obese adults (2004): 27.3%
In addition to the shifting lifestyles of these countries, scientists have long believed that Latin American, African and South Asian populations have an abundance of thrifty genes that help humans survive times of famine.
If we haven’t already hit the panic button on this issue yet, we need to. As of yet, no country has successfully reduced obesity rates. Reversing this trend will take a powerful social paradigm shift and perhaps an even more powerful shift in political will.
18 Comments
Add Your Comment
ADVERTISING
New
- FROM DIET BLOG
- On-Off Fasting: Does It Work?
- 400 Calorie Fix
- 5 Factor World Diet
- Quick Giveaway: Powerhouse Weight Loss Game
- FORUM
- Low Carb Atkins Diet- Tips to Cut the Carbs.
- How Can I Gain a Healthy Weight and Keep it?
- How Do I Eat Healthy at University?
- Starving Myself and Exercising, But Not Losing an Ounce?
Categories
| Body Image Celebrities Diet Pills Diets Exercise |
Fast Food Funny Stuff Success Stories Teens and Kids Tips and Tools |
RSS Feed
Follow @DietBlog on Twitter
No sarcasm and no underlying current .... just honestly wondering about what you said,
"Reversing this trend will take ......... perhaps an even more powerful shift in political will. "
Does that mean you want the government to tell us all what we can and cannot do?
ReplyI don't want government directives, but we do need to act locally (as the saying goes). Maybe starting with my pet peeve; after-sport snacks for the teams...which are usually snack cakes and Capri Sun.
Heck, if it can become socially acceptable for women to walk around half naked--with their underwear showing--surely we can get some societal pressure to make better food choices.
ReplyThere are a lot of political issues that can be addressed without the government telling us individually what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Many initiatives include requiring sidewalks, rezoning building areas (currently happening where I live) so that any new construction has to meet x, y, and z criteria before building, requiring x amount of free land for parks and rec facilities, etc. Unfortunately, these new initiatives and laws are just occurring at the local and state level and not nationally. Some younger cities are getting and understanding this need. I know when I start looking to buy something next year, the neighborhood has to meet my own criteria so that I can continue living a healthier lifestyle.
ReplyObesity has reached epidemic levels in developing countries including Malaysia. An article couple of months back reported that obesity in adults has increased 3 times within the last 10 years. A global problem called globesity, sure is.
ReplyI'd be curious to see how the number of fast food joints changed in those years.
Now, before you call me crazy, look at Okinawa Japan. Okinawa once was (and still will be for a while) known for having the most centaurians (100+) IN THE WORLD. Which tells us they're doing something right. But, with the strong American military presence and general Westernization, tons of fast food chains have popped up there (KFC, Mcdonalds, A & W, etc) and now Okinawa is known for having the highest level of obesity and the highest level of diabetes out of all of Japan. Hmm....
MARIE!!! I've been looking for you to tell you about some good after-sport snacks :D Nabisco makes a new Garden Harvest line that is basically whole wheat and fruit/veggies and not much else. Super yummy and you get 1/2 serving of fruit/veggies in one serving of chips.
ReplyI believe that a large part of the problem is commercialism. That Hardee's breakfast burrito is an outlier, but there's a huge amount of cheap, high calorie food available. A huge amount of money being spent to hire very intelligent people to find ways to make the food cheaper and more appealing. The government - at least in the US - is part of this process, as anyone who had followed the farm bill knows.
I don't think societal pressure can solve this problem - there's too much advertising money pushing the other way. And, people are, well, human. It's very easy to fall into the fast food trap, and it's even easier when you're overworked or underpaid, or you don't live in a nuclear family.
I don't think industry will fix itself. From a balance book point of view, an overfed population with a constellation of health-related problems is an opportunity to make money. I'm not arguing that industry is evil, but the natural goal of industry is to make money. Companies have to continuously invent new products or find new markets to grow, and growth is necessary for capitalization. The recent article in the NY times diabetes has risen to the fifth most common cause of mortality in the US probably caused more people to invest in companies that benefit from this fact than to write their local politicians to increase funding to fight diabetes.
Government, for better or worse, is the only entity left to do what can't be done bottom up and cannot be done via industry.
I don't find this comforting. In some cases, I think it is right for the government to ban or to make hard some practices. I'm all for the government regulating cigarettes and going after the tobacco companies. But, it's hard to say that this is a model for anything; it's been more an example of how ineffictive government intervention can be than anything else.
A solution - if one exists, will probably be a combination of the three.
ReplyThis feels more like good news to me. Although I know obesity has health consequences, I would think starvation is much worst (including an even shorter lifespan and feelings of desperation).
ReplyYou don't have to regulate the bad food away. Fix a few things like the farm bill, which makes unhealthy food artificially cheap, force restaurants to display nutritional information of their foods and provide educational information in schools and elsewhere on healthy lifestyles (that also means cutting out unhealthy foods in school cafeterias. At that point you let adults make their own choice.
Gal
ReplyBut I can add my 2c.
The 4 nations highlighted in this article are problematic. They are not the US. The US certainly has it's protectionist trade laws that artificially deflate the price of things like corn. However these other countries don't necessarily have those same trading policies in place.
Look at China. The more it has pursued an affluent Western materialistic lifestyle - the fatter people get!
I don't think anyone here wants Nanny State or the Govt telling us what we can put on our dinner tables. But I must agree with Quito here. A self-regulating advertising industry is an oxymoron. Government health education simply CANNOT compete with the colossal ad budgets/branding that comes out of some the big food brands.
There is quite simply no simple answer.
How do the poorer nations fit here? They don't have big media etc... yet they do have nutritionally-poor easy-to-eat foods coming into the country.
Food Technologists have a lot to answer for...
Reply"For most developing nations, obesity is a now more serious threat than hunger. "
I cant believe that.
ReplyIt's interesting that they say that "thrifty genes" are abundant in Latin America, China, Africa, etc. I think "thrifty genes" are in general a lot more common than "non thrifty genes". Look at just about any animal that is given unlimited access to food; most of them will gain weight and get fatter to store the food for times when food is less common.
ReplyThe fact that more than 1.3 billion people are overweight around the world is very disturbing. I want to help change this but really feel that it is overwhelming and maybe I should first start in my own town. I live in a small town with about 10,000 people and run the fitness gym so the influence I have is pretty powerful. My goal is try to create a atmosphere for health and fitness outside of the gym as well. Little steps I pray will better people's health.
ReplyHas anyone actually identified any "thrifty genes" or is it just a plausible explanation?
ReplyWhen I was kid there were no MacDonals in my country (Portugal). Coca Cola came in 22 cl bottles. Pizzas were expensive because you had to go to an Italian restaurant to eat them. I was in my early teens when Mac and Pizza Hut got in our marked.
I’m 36 and I’m clearly overweight – I wear an American size 12 and some times it’s difficult to find nice clothes. 90 % of my friends wear a size 6 or 8.
The saddest thing is that many teenagers are overweight. It quite common to see young girls that weight a lot more than I. So, I’m overweight compared with same age friends but quite normal when compared with at least 30% of teenagers. And their bellies! Most of them seem normal until you look at their bellies. And it’s the worst kind of body fat you can have…
The government has issued some rules about food in schools but it has been pointless, kids just cross the street and buy junk food.
Last time I went to MacDonalds, they had menus with 50 cl coke glasses. Who the hell drinks half a litre of coke just to chew a burger?
One of things the government can do is to have a mandatory discipline at school about the correlation between health and food, increase the investment in sport facilities… but it’s not easy. Food companies seem to have endless financial resources… Europe is getting fatter everyday.
ReplyYour body is your responsibility, people need to get this. You can't blame your body on anyone or anything else - government, food companies, whatever. There is a correlation between how much you exercise, what you eat, and how much you weigh. Very simple.
ReplyI'm pretty sure if every food company started making reduced fat foods people would just eat more of it.
Besides, shouldn't we be lauding, at least to some extent, that people are getting fatter? For thousands of years most human beings have struggled to find food,and now when food, for the most part, has becoome widely available we worry that we're becoming too fat....Oh the irony.
Reply"Thrifty genes" is pure bullhonkey!
See here that it's just a hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrifty_gene_hypothesis
So do these hypothesizers believe that some bodies can run on less energy? Explain to me just how they can do that. Or maybe they absorb more of the food, and have smaller poops?
This is just a stupid excuse for some populations that have poorer diets. Cheap, high carbs. Or in the case of Mexican food, cheese covered carbs of insulin havoc.
It's the insulemic foods. It's a rapid shift in traditional, healthy diets to an industrialized diet where these ethnic groups have not yet adapted to wise meal choices. It's a sudden decrease in natural physical activity, associated with a sudden shift to wealth and not yet adapted to imposed activity.
It's naivety and ignorance, and not genomic, as most errors are and are not.
Reply