theskeptic's Journal: economist on Mexico

Read it here- http://economist.com/world/la/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3507918

The same problem is taking on epidemic proportions in India. By 2025, India will have 150 million diabetics. A scary proposition.
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Fat Mexico

Sins of the fleshy

Dec 16th 2004 | MEXICO CITY
From The Economist print edition

Mexico now enjoys two important characteristics of rich countries. Unfortunately, they are obesity and diabetes

FOOD and drink play a major role in Christmas celebrations in most countries, but in few more so than in Mexico. Many families over the festive season will do little more than cook and ingest a seemingly constant cycle of tortillas, fried beans, meat both roasted and stewed, and sticky desserts for days on end. Thus does the extended family keep on extending--further and further over their collective waistlines.

Lucky them, you might think. Except that Mexico's bad eating habits are leading to a health crisis that most Mexicans seem blissfully unaware of. Obesity and its related disorder, diabetes, are now major health concerns in a country where large rural regions are still concerned more with under- than with over-nourishment. In its perennial rivalry with the United States, Mexico has at last found an area in which it can match its northern neighbour--mouthful for mouthful.

The statistics are impressive, and alarming. According to the OECD, Mexico is now the second fattest nation in that group of 30 countries. A health poll in 1999 found that 35% of women were overweight, and another 24% technically obese. Juan Rivera, an official at the National Institute of Public Health, says that the combined figure for men would be about 55%, and that a similar poll to be carried out next year will show the fat quotient rising. Only the United States, with combined figures of over 60%, is ahead.

That situation also varies geographically. Although Mexicans populate the north of their country more sparsely than the south, they make up for it weight-wise. A study published by the Pan-American Health Organisation a month ago showed that in the mostly Hispanic population that lives on either side of the American-Mexican border, fully 74% of men and 70% of women are either overweight or obese.

Moreover, even experts have been surprised by how rapidly the nation has swollen. Whereas the 1999 poll showed 59% of women overweight or obese, only 11 years previously that figure was just 33%. Nowhere is the transformation more noticeable than in the prevalence of diabetes, closely linked to over-eating and obesity. In 1968, says Joel Rodríguez of the Mexican Diabetes Federation, the disease was in 35th place as a direct cause of mortality in Mexico, but now it occupies first place, above both cancer and heart disease. With about 6.5m diabetics out of a population of 100m, Mexico now has a higher rate than any other large country in the world. Not surprisingly, Mr Rodríguez argues that Mexico is in the grip of an "epidemic".

Nor does it tax the brain much to work out that the causes of these explosions in obesity and diabetes are the Mexican diet and a lack of exercise. For most Mexicans, food consumption, not just at Christmas but all year round, is an unvarying combination of refried beans, tortillas, meat and refrescos, or fizzy drinks; they consume 101 litres of cola drinks per person per year, just a little less than Americans and three times as much as Brazilians.

Meanwhile, the lack of exercise, Mr Rivera argues, is a symptom of rapid urbanisation over the past 30 years. Obesity and diabetes rates remain slightly lower in rural areas, indicating that manual labour endures as an effective way to stave off weight gain. In Mexico City, though, pollution and crime have progressively driven people out of the parks and the streets, so most now walk as little as possible--preferably no further than from the valet-parking service to the restaurant.

To combat the fat, health professionals say that the country must first realise that it is indeed in the grip of an epidemic. Other diseases, such as AIDS and cancer, have captured most of the publicity in recent years; obesity and diabetes have been comparatively neglected.

But these are also, as in other developing countries, mainly problems of the urban poor. It is a symptom of their growing prosperity that these parts of the population have, probably for the first time, almost unlimited access to the greatest amount of calories for the smallest amount of money. But with little knowledge of nutritional values, their diets are now unbalanced and unhealthy.

Low-carb products and other dietary imports from the United States have already made an appearance on the posher Mexican supermarket shelves. They may go into the shopping baskets of the rake-thin and utterly unrepresentative models who dominate the country's advertising hoardings. But they are still comparatively expensive. For the heaving mass of the population, things may have to get worse before the government, doctors and consumers realise that things have got to start getting better.