Climate change will curb global surge in fat people

GWYNNE DYER, Aug 22, 2006)

Being fat is the new normal, but it won't last. The global surge in
overweight people is concentrated among lower-income city-dwellers, and
some may choose to slim down as they climb further up the income scale.
("You can never be too rich or too slim.") But the real guarantee of a
slimmer world, unfortunately, is climate change.

"Obesity is the norm globally, and under-nutrition, while still
important in a few countries and in (certain groups) in many others, is
no longer the dominant disease," said Dr.. Barry Popkin of the
University of North Carolina this week at a conference in Queensland,
Australia. Dr. Popkin studies "nutrition transition," the changes that
accompany the shift from a traditional rural diet to a modern urban
diet, and he has concluded that thanks to high-speed urbanization, the
fat now outnumber the starving.

We have grown accustomed to Americans who look almost perfectly
spherical, and we are seeing more and more Europeans who seem to aspire
to the same goal. Popkin's point is that this is not due to some moral
failure in the American and European populations, but to the changes
that come with urbanization: higher incomes, mass marketing of
processed foods, and work patterns involving much less physical labour.
His proof is that the rates of obesity in developing countries
undergoing rapid urbanization are rapidly catching up with the levels
in the rich countries.

Mexicans of all ages and both sexes are now on average as fat as
Americans. In Kuwait, Thailand and Tunisia, 25 to 50 per cent of the
population are suffering not only developed-world levels of obesity,
but also similar plagues of "non-communicable" obesity-related diseases
like diabetes and heart failure. South African and Egyptian women are
as fat as American women (although their men lag behind their American
counterparts).

In some places, specific local factors play a role as well. In much of
Africa, for example, fatness in women was traditionally seen as
testimony to the wealth and generosity of their husbands, and recent
research in South Africa has revealed a new, additional factor: the
fear that being slim will make people think you have AIDS.

Half of all women in South Africa are overweight, compared to only a
third of South African men, and the problem is particularly acute among
black women, one-third of whom are clinically obese. "Regretfully,"
says Tessa van der Merwe of the International Association for the Study
of Obesity, "there is a perception that if a black woman is thin, she
might have HIV/AIDS or that her husband can't afford to feed her well."
So South Africans, with far lower average incomes than Americans, are
only 20 per cent less overweight than people in the United States,
generally conceded to be the world's fattest country.

But the shift in dietary patterns and the consequent rise in obesity
among the urban population affect the great majority of lower- and
middle-income countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin
America. Moreover, this is happening at a much earlier point in the
economic and social development of these countries than was the case in
the "old rich" countries.

The typical pattern in 19th-century Europe was that the high-income
groups put on weight first. (Think of the stereotypical cartoon
plutocrat --he's always fat.) Only much later, when cheap fats and
sweeteners became generally available to the working class, did the
urban poor start to bulk up as the rich slimmed down. But this pattern
is now kicking in at a point in countries' development where
malnutrition is still widespread.

In urban Brazil, for example, the poor are now on average significantly
fatter than the rich, even though the same slum households may also
still contain some malnourished people. Urban adults in China and
Indonesia are twice as likely to be obese as rural adults. In the
Congo, city-dwellers are six times likelier to be fat.

It's not a pretty picture -- a world full of Michelin men and women --
but the alternative is worse: a world of very hungry people. And the
alternative, alas, is far more likely by the end of this century.

Cheap and plentiful food for the urban masses of a
multi-billion-population world is an astonishing achievement, but it is
probably in its last few decades. Most of the world's great fisheries
are nearing collapse due to overfishing and pollution, and a couple
have already died (like the Grand Banks off Newfoundland). More
worrisome still is the likely impact of global warming on the great
agricultural regions that feed most of those billions of people, like
the Chinese river valleys, the American Midwest, and the north Indian
plain.

A couple of years ago Dr Jyoti Parikh, director of IRADe (Integrated
Research for Action and Development), a New Delhi-based
non-governmental organization, did a detailed study for the World Bank
about the probable effects on Indian agriculture of a two-degree
(Celsius) rise in average temperature. The impact was different for
different regions of the country, of course, but she concluded that
overall Indian food production would be about one-quarter less than at
present.

The world is probably going to get considerably hotter than that, and
most of the other great bread-baskets of the world will be similarly
affected. Obesity is not our long-term problem.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.

http://www.therecord.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=record/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1156197012664&call_pageid=1024322168441&col=1024322596091