((C) Gordos) |
“It is a
strange drink because it’s black. I like it more than other soft drinks”, says
a teenager in a fast food restaurant in Mexico City, sipping from a cola drink.
A girl next to him says: “The very first thing I do when I get up in the
morning is take a soda from the fridge”.
Mexico is
the world’s fattest country. Figures from the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that more Mexicans are obese than in
any other country. Consumption of soda and carbonated drinks, together with
fast food, are a major contributing factor in this growing obesity epidemic.
The numbers
are terrifying. According to Alejandro Calviño, president of ‘El Poder del
Consumidor’ (The Power of the Consumer), “excess weight and obesity are the
cause of the most prevalent life-threatening diseases in Mexico”. An estimated
70% of Mexican adults are overweight or obese - one in three women and one in
men. Mexico is also the country with the highest number of children between 5
and 11 years who are overweight.
“It is not
a problem of aesthetics; it's a problem of public health because the death rate
as a consequence of diabetes is 80 per 100.000 inhabitants. This causes very
high costs that the Government is not able to deal with”, says Calviño.
Vitamin T
vs. fast food
At this
point, obesity and excess weight have taken on epidemic proportions, and they
are propelled by a flood of adversting of un-healthy products. Making matters
worse, healthy food is more expensive. Young people, who are most inclined to
adopt bad eating habits, spend many hours a day watching television and
‘consuming’ the advertising, while eating their pizzas and drinking their
sodas, “an explosive combination”, says Calviño.
Between 11
and 12 % of the world’s production of Coca Cola goes to Mexico, leading Olivier
De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, to condemn the
‘coca-colization of diets’ in Mexico.
Alejandro
Calviño adds that moderate consumption of Mexico’s ‘Vitamin T’ - tacos,
tortillas, tamales and tequila - is not the problem but, “obesity is caused by
a change in eating habits and the introduction of highly processed food”.
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