Mexico and the Epidemic of Obesity
At one time, Mexico was one of
the healthiest countries in the world, mainly because the food they ate was
nearly all hand-made and home-grown, and most of the population was physically
active on their family land each day. In modern Mexico, however,
times are changing rapidly, and obesity and its related diseases are
dramatically on the rise. Prevention has been found to be key, and simply
treating the disease and its symptoms ineffective.
Furthermore, multiple studies
have concluded that obesity has less to do with the individual, and more to do
with the very environment each person finds themselves in, namely poverty,
unemployment, and a food-system now entrenched with commercialized and
processed foods. Programs to combat poverty and socioeconomic
problems, providing education and knowledge on how to make healthy-food
choices, and more physical daily movement are appearing to offer more viable
and long-term solutions to overcome this current health crisis in Mexico.
Poverty
has been shown to be a direct link to obesity, and poverty is wide-spread
throughout Mexico. Much of this poverty is due to the
commercialization of farming, not only driving the once-prevalent small family
farms to sell their home-grown products at a severely discounted rate, but also
forcing many farms to completely close, unable to compete with the
industrialized-farming giants and their much-less-expensive commercialized
products being sold in the big-chain grocery stores (Wilhelm 18-20). Wilhelm writes that “peasants in the rural
areas outside of Mexico City are essentially forced into migration as a result
of limited economic opportunity in the rural areas” (20).
The Mexican government has implemented many
programs in an attempt to combat obesity, including installing exercise
machines in urban centres, a sales tax on soda, and even fining schools for
serving soft drinks, but obesity is still on the rise (Wilhelm, 4,6,10). Wilhelm has found that the public health
crisis of obesity is not as simple as prescribing more gym-time and less soda; instead, it is a result of underlying political economy issues (4). These issues include "poverty, unemployment,
migration, and in particular, the loss of farmers’ jobs in Mexico. Public
policy functions to treat the symptoms of the public health crisis do not fully
acknowledging the root causes of the crisis” (4).
Levasseur has conducted research on the
“Conditional Cash Transfers” (CTT) program currently offered in Mexico, which
offers cash incentives to combat hunger along with extreme and chronic poverty
(145). This program has been proven to
be one of the most “successful and ambitious around the world” regarding
capital and poverty indicators and has more recently been studied by Levasseur
for the possibility of simultaneously reducing obesity through the same
incentive system (144). The conclusions
of this study directly support Levasseur’s belief that poverty and obesity are
directly and irrevocably related (152). Socioeconomic
programs such as the CTT program in Mexico offer strong evidence to support
more time, money and effort should be placed on refining and expanding these
types of programs that offer a real solution to poverty and therefore obesity.
Home-grown food is naturally healthier,
but it was not something a person had to “learn” or “know” about in the
past. Food was simply grown or raised
and then eaten. As that aspect of life
changed for Mexico, and people moved to urban settings, they started eating
fast food, commercial food, and processed food (Marron-Ponce et al). Significant over-consumption of soft drinks,
potato chips, candy, and sweets have markedly impacted the health of Mexicans
and their quality of life (Wilhelm 2).
There
is evidence that many Mexicans have little knowledge or information about what
constitutes “healthy” eating, and there appears to be a strong link between a
lack of whole-foods education and the rising obesity rates (Levasseur 146). To highlight how grave of a situation Mexico
currently has regarding their fight against obesity, one can look at their soda
consumption: “Mexico is the greatest consumer of soda in the world with an
average of 46 gallons per person per year—86% more than the average American” (Wilhelm
6).
The success of the (aforementioned) CTT
program, that offers training on healthy-food choices as one of their cash incentives,
is an example of how education directly impacts obesity in Mexico: as people
learn to make new eating choices, their weight correspondingly drops.
As the rural farming communities of Mexico
started moving to urban centres, their way of life changed dramatically: most people
now spend their days virtually sedentary.
Their physical output has decreased substantially, yet the calories
consumed are not always altered. Life in
the urban centres of Mexico come at a high cost for many Mexicans: economic and
employment opportunities in the cities cannot support the levels of migration
from the rural areas, and Mexicans are left in worse poverty than they had in
the countryside (Wilhelm 20).
Wilhelm has
found that industrialized farming has caused job losses for millions of
Mexicans, leaving already extremely-poor areas with no infrastructure, and skyrocketing
agricultural unemployment (20). Now
ensconced in the urban settings, Mexicans are no longer eating their natural
foods and have started consuming the very commercialized products that has forced
them off their family farms. Wilhelm
writes that obesity is a direct result of these nutritional changes in the past
few generations, including increased consumption of sugar, refined
carbohydrates, processed foods, and sodas (2). They cite the Public Health Nutrition of Mexico: “Access to inexpensive
but high energy-dense food is rising and physical activity is decreasing, since
large numbers of people now live in urban areas and are engaged in less
physical activity” (2).
Marron-Ponce et
al confirms this link between urbanization and obesity: as the cities are
flooded with new residents, demand for inexpensive food rises, and
supermarkets, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants snatch up their
share of the market. It appears that
obesity is a health crisis with the clear potential for prevention and
reversal, yet it seems little is being done on a socioeconomic or political
level to deal with the negative results of mass urbanization in Mexico. With the shift from rural life to urban life,
Mexico and its citizens must find new ways to combat a sedentary lifestyle and
resist the commercialized and processed foods they now find at their immediate disposal.
Despite Mexico making a wide variety of
changes to its public policies to combat obesity, such as the tax on soft
drinks, obesity continues to rise instead of lower. The fact is that obesity has been proven to
be a socioeconomic problem resulting as a direct link to the high poverty rates
in Mexico. With the high poverty rates
comes a correlation to a lack of current education on what constitutes
“healthy” food choices. The influx of
inexpensive commercialized products into their country has left the cash-poor
citizens of Mexico nearly forced to purchase these lower-priced commercial products.
Forced from their family farms, a high
percentage of the citizens of Mexico have become sedentary and without employment
or direction. Attempting to combat
obesity or its symptoms in and of itself is not dealing with the root or causal
issues that plague Mexico. Studies have
continually proven that attempting to convince people to eat less or exercise
more is not a sustainable or effective way to deal with obesity.
Mexico must find new ways to address their
current health crisis: they must look outside of the traditional models of the
past that have offered neither solutions nor success. Evidence shows that Mexico must expand their socioeconomic
programs to combat poverty and reduce consumption of processed foods, while
supporting a healthier and more sustainable local-farm movement back into
existence.
Works Cited
Levasseur,
Pierre. “Can social programs break the vicious cycle between poverty and
obesity? Evidence from urban Mexico.” Science
Direct – World Development, Vol. 113, Jan 2019, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18303279?via%3Dihub. Accessed 3 June 2019.
Marrón-Ponce,
Joaquín Alejandro et al. “Trends in Ultra-Processed Food Purchases from 1984 to
2016 in Mexican Households.” Nutrients, vol.
11 (1), no. 45, 26 Dec. 2018, doi:10.3390/nu11010045. Accessed 3 June 2019.
Wilhelm,
Haley M. “Tipping the Scales: The Public Health Crisis in Mexico.” Scripps Senior Theses, Paper 733, 2016, scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1826&context=scripps_theses. Accessed 5 June 2019.
