It’s a weighty task. The diet drive is headquartered in Dubec, on the outskirts of Prague. Rudolf Poledne, a biochemist, has bombarded the village’s 1,800 residents with health propaganda. His team held a salad-making contest. (The primary-school principal won.) A local hospital has treated 400 high-risk patients with cholesterol-reducing drugs. The Central European Center for Health and Environment, the Berlin-based organization that launched the Dubec program, hopes to use the model across the entire former Eastern bloc.
In the Czech Republic, economic reforms have already reshaped the country’s diet. When the government stopped subsidizing meat and dairy products in 1991, prices for high-cholesterol butter and sour cream jumped three times, and the cost of salami more than doubled. Thanks to the private market, carts of bananas, apples and oranges began to appear on every corner. Cholesterol levels dropped by some 5 percent; the mortality rate from heart disease dropped for men by 13 percent and for women by 9 percent. Fitness and weight loss became a kind offad among women and children. ““Before,it was just considered normal that if you had had two children,’’ says Poledne, ““you should be fat.''
The collapse of communism also allowed doctors to break another taboo. Communist bureaucrats had discouraged scientists from exploring new ideas about health that trickled in from the West – in part because concerns about cholesterol threatened the entire agricultural system, which emphasized meat and dairy production, and highlighted the communists’ inability to deliver fresh vegetables to the shops. ““During the communist regime, if someone spoke of vegetarian food, it was almost a crime against the state,’’ says Sona Strbanova, a Czech biochemist who works for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Prague. ““You can’t introduce healthy living without democracy.''
But changing people’s habits is tough. The biggest successes in Dubec have been with women and children. At the primary school, which now serves vegetables grown in its own garden for lunch, kindergartners are indoctrinated in the perils of potato dumplings. Martina Taborska, 13, eats soy meat, but her father prefers meat. Women complain that their husbands yell at them when they try to serve salads and vegetables.
At U Sokolovy, the Dubec sports bar, the resistance lives on. A group of construction workers – most of them patients in the high-risk program – are smoking and guzzling beer in front of a Russian-Czech hockey game on the TV. Among the high-risk patients, only a third of the smokers have quit, and weights haven’t fallen. ““I try hard to change, but I haven’t made good progress,’’ says Pavel Pokorny, 50, a ruddy-faced construction worker who admits he lies to the doctor about his beer consumption. ““We all lie. I need it because I work hard and I must eat well.’’ His daily menu: bread and butterfor breakfast, and bread, fatty sausage and egg dumplings for lunch and supper. ““What can I tell you? If my wife started making vegetables every day, I’d go someplace else to take my meals.’’ This revolution has a long way to go.
