France’s growing fat problem underscores how inexorable the Americanization of food habits has become. The problem is even more acute in the developing world, where the taste for American fast-food products like McDonald’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola has long been fashionable. Urbanization is leading to more sedentary lifestyles in many places. And more and more, even traditional foods are being prepared from processed flour and other ingredients that yield more calories and less healthy roughage. Nobody ever thought resisting the export of American diets would be easy. But the trend has turned out to be more insidious and more widespread than previously thought. “It’s very easy to blame globalization, or the big brands like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s,” says Derek Yach, executive director of the World Health Organization’s disease prevention, nutrition, diet and physical-fitness program. “But the problem goes much, much deeper.”
Diet and exercise habits may be complex, but the basic recipe for health problems is simple: a rise in caloric intake and a decline in calorie-burning activities. The number of overweight people in the United States doubled in the past 20 years to 60 percent, and Europe and Asia are catching up. In some developing countries, obesity is increasing faster than in America–the rate is three times higher in –Mexico and Egypt. Each year more new cases of diabetes arise in China and India than in all other countries combined.
Where are all the extra calories coming from? One surprising source is the raw grains and other ingredients used for cooking traditional–formerly healthy–dishes. When crops are grown in big farms and processed en masse, much of their nutrient value is taken out, and their “caloric density” rises. Even the noodle, a staple of many traditional diets, is no longer as healthy as it once was. In China, for instance, home-cooked noodles used to be made from whole-grains, ground by hand. Now, households use factory-made “refined” flour, from which the grain husks have been discarded along with nutrients like fiber and minerals. What remains are simple carbohydrates that the body more easily turns into fat.
Cooking oils have taken a similar turn for the worse. Back in the 1960s, Japanese and American researchers discovered an inexpensive way to extract oil from vegetables. Westerners and developing countries alike adopted vegetable oils as a cheaper alternative to butter, healthy if used in moderation. The problem is, the oil is so cheap that in places like India it’s used to excess. It’s not uncommon for Indian cooks to use vegetable oil for breakfast, lunch and supper, and to throw in an extra 10 or 20 grams to enhance a dish’s flavor.
Sugar is another culprit. Diets in some developing countries contain on average about 300 more calories a day than they did 20 years ago, according to Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. Some of the extra sugar comes from soda, but a bigger factor is the growing adoption of Western manufacturing practices, which allow local companies to sweeten bread and other staples. Brazil now consumes more sugar per capita than even the United States.
No part of the world, no matter how remote, is immune from empty calories. Over the course of 30 years, the native population of Samoa has fallen victim to rampant weight gain–today more than half its residents are clinically obese. James Bindon, a biological anthropologist at Alabama University, traced one of the causes to a fondness for tins of corned beef imported from England. Similar trends have been observed in Fiji. “Where in the past they produced their own fruits and vegetables, now they’re swamped with canned soda and mutton fat imported from New Zealand,” says Yach of WHO. “Call it the Coca-Colafication of the Pacific islands.”
People in both developed and developing countries are also doing less and less physical activity. It’s the couch-potato syndrome. Rather than riding their bicycles and working the fields, people sit on assembly lines, ride in cars and spend their free time watching television–95 percent of Chinese households now have a TV set. “We export our jobs, and our wage-labor patterns,” says Bindon. “It’s a culture-bound syndrome.”
The syndrome is raising health-care costs–$100 billion for obese children in the United States, estimates the Centers for Disease Control. What about the 35 million overweight kids around the world, not to mention 300 million adults? “The cost of health care–to feed the hungry and pay for the medical bills of obesity is staggering,” says Weight Watchers International chief science officer Karen Miller-Kovach. Unfortunately, obesity and all the illnesses it entails hit the poor hardest of all. High-caloric junk food is cheap enough to afford even on a low income. And the well-heeled and well-educated tend to be better about hitting the gym. In developing countries, those leisure activities aren’t even an option yet. The popularity of Western-style food has thus led to an alarming trend: obese parents and undernourished children living under the same roof. “It’s a very attractive lifestyle,” says Popkin. But it’s killing people all the same.
