“I want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
5 September 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
If my fading memory is correct, the speaker was Mahatma Gandhi and this was how he responded when asked to describe the perfect world. Apparently we have arrived at Gandhi’s perfect world: for the first time in human history poor people (in the developed countries) are dying not of starvation but from obesity. How incredible. The pendulum has swung, apparently without pause, from one extreme to another. At a recently held world obesity conference the obesity epidemic was labeled “pandemic.” Obesity is often genetic and often bought on by excess: starvation is bought on by not having enough to eat. Obesity (not always) is a result of having too much of the wrong foods. You can always cut back on too much of a bad thing. Too little is problematic. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you don’t need a 2,000 delegate conference to know that the obesity epidemic is here. I feel the problem is the easy availability and affordability of the Empty Calorie. Different types of calories have differing effects on the human body. The empty calorie is no myth; some calories are incredibly beneficial while other calories have a neutral effect and still other calories are positively detrimental. That’s a fact. A calorie derived from a fibrous vegetable is positively beneficial. No argument. Fiber is extremely difficult for the human body to break down and compartmentalize and for fiber to end up stored as body fat is a near impossibility. At the other extreme refined carbohydrates, manmade stuff (a calorie derived from a Hostess Twinkie) are EASILY converted into body fat. Eating too much broccoli, even if the individual is on the plus-side of the energy balance equation, will not result in newly manufactured body fat. Eating ice cream or a bag of BBQ chips, both calorically dense foods, can easily end up stored as body fat. Refined carbs calories naturally gravitate towards fat storage.
Empty calories are cheap. Because they are constructed at a factory they can be mass produced. The reason poor people eat a preponderance of manmade foods loaded with empty calories is they are cheap, far cheaper than natural foods. A pound of low fat seafood will run $10 a pound whereas $10 at a7-11 store can buy two big bites loaded with artificial cheese, a 16-ounce soda and a giant candy bar for desert. This adds up to around 2,000 calories and every single calorie consumed having a tendency to end up in fat storage compartments. After eating at 7-11, the poor person would still have enough change from that $10 to go buy a 650-calorie Quarter Pounder with cheese at McDonalds. So $10 can purchase empty 3,000 to 4,000 calories of 750-1000 lean and clean calories. Calories need to be differentiated. Here is the blurb about the obesity pandemic. Cheap refined carbohydrate foods are keeping poor people alive; people that formerly would have starved to death or gone hungry are able to eat super-cheap foods. The calories are empty but there is a financial premium placed on quality calories. No obvious solutions, just an observation from a skewed vantage point: mine. Seems as if some people are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Obesity has reached pandemic proportions throughout the world and is now the greatest single contributor to chronic disease, an international conference was told here. “This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world,” Australia’s Monash University professor Paul Zimmet, chair of the 10th International Congress on Obesity, said on the opening day of the conference. The spread of the problem was “led by affluent western nations, whose physical activity and dietary habits are regrettably being adopted by developing nations,” Zimmet told more than 2,000 delegates. The world now has more fat people than hungry ones, according to World Health Organization figures, with more than a billion overweight people compared to 800 million who are undernourished. The congress on obesity is held every four years, with the last three staged in Toronto (1994), Paris (1998) and Sao Paulo (2002). “The conference will treat obesity as the keystone of all health priorities because it is the single greatest contributor to chronic disease throughout the world,” said University of Sydney professor Ian Caterson, the event co-chair. “There are now more overweight people in the world than undernourished and we are seeing the double burden of the extremes of malnutrition — under nutrition and over nutrition — in many developing countries.”We know this is not about gluttony — it is the interaction of heredity and environment. We know that small changes can make a big difference in people’s weight and health.” Zimmet said the problem needed urgent solutions — not just widespread changes to diet and exercise but the rethinking of national policies on urban and social planning, agriculture policy, education, transport and other areas. He also warned in an opening address that the growth of obesity-related diabetes, or so-called “diabesity”, was set to bankrupt health budgets all over the world. Around 370 speakers and presenters at the six-day congress will discuss a range of issues, including scientific research on how the brain regulates energy and advances in the prevention and clinical management of obesity. The conference is being attended by academics and health professionals from Australia, Japan, the United States, Britain, Canada, Sweden, Indonesia and New Zealand.
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