Planet Fat
The New York Times (paywall but some free articles each month) is doing a series "exploring the causes and the consequences of rising obesity rates around the world."
Quote:
How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...estle.html?_r=0
As multinational companies push deeper into the developing world, they are transforming local agriculture, spurring farmers to abandon subsistence crops in favor of cash commodities like sugar cane, corn and soybeans — the building blocks for many industrial food products. ...
In many ways, Brazil is a microcosm of how growing incomes and government policies have led to longer, better lives and largely eradicated hunger. But now the country faces a stark new nutrition challenge: over the last decade, the country’s obesity rate has nearly doubled to 20 percent, and the portion of people who are overweight has nearly tripled to 58 percent. Each year, 300,000 people are diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a condition with strong links to obesity. ...
“What we have is a war between two food systems, a traditional diet of real food once produced by the farmers around you and the producers of ultra-processed food designed to be over-consumed and which in some cases are addictive,” said Carlos A. Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo.
“It’s a war,” he said, “but one food system has disproportionately more power than the other.” ...
Until recently, Nestlé sponsored a river barge that delivered tens of thousands of cartons of milk powder, yogurt, chocolate pudding, cookies and candy to isolated communities in the Amazon basin. Since the barge was taken out of service in July, private boat owners have stepped in to meet the demand. ...
...at a brightly painted day care center in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. ..
The program, run by the Center for Nutritional Recovery and Education, includes prediabetic 10-year-olds with dangerously fatty livers, adolescents with hypertension and toddlers so poorly nourished they have trouble walking...
“It’s a crisis for our society because we are producing a generation of children with impaired cognitive abilities who will not reach their full potential.”
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Especially poignant in that article was the street vendor, herself overweight, hypertensive and diabetic, of Nestle products whose job has brought her enough prosperity that she says, “For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of hope and independence,” ... “I want to buy a bigger refrigerator.”
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