 |
| I'm now thinking the striped shirt wasn't a good idea |
From the McClatchy Newspapers:
Mexico facing a diabetes 'disaster' as obesity levels soar
By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers
Last updated: November 21, 2012 06:41:34 AM
MEXICO CITY -- With each bite into a greasy taco and slurp of a sugary drink, Mexico hurtles toward what health experts predict will be a public health crisis from diabetes-related disease.
A fifth of all Mexican women and more than a quarter of men are believed to be at risk for diabetes now. It’s already the nation’s No. 1 killer, taking some 70,000 lives a year, far more than gangster violence.
Public health experts blame changes in lifestyle that have made Mexicans more obese than anywhere else on Earth except the United States. They attribute changes to powerful snack and soft drink industries, newly sedentary ways of living and a genetic heritage susceptible to diabetes, a chronic, life-threatening illness.
... Somewhere between 6.5 million and 10 million Mexicans now have diabetes, the Health Secretariat says. While the numbers are fewer than the 20 million who suffer from diabetes in the United States, Mexico carries the seeds of an unfolding tragedy linked both to soaring obesity and shifting demographics that will heavily burden health systems.
... The once-languid pace of Mexican life has undergone radical transformation in recent decades. Crowded urban areas force long commutes on workers, and public security concerns keep them cooped up at home.
Workers who once would return to their homes for long lunch breaks, eating freshly prepared foods, no longer can do that.
“It is practically impossible to go home to eat lunch now,” said Dr. Gabriela Ortiz, a department director at the National Center for Preventative Health and Disease Control. “We ask for food to be delivered to our office. Some employees go out to the taco stands on the corner or to the street markets.”
Since tap water is widely considered unsafe, and public drinking fountains rare, most Mexicans swill a sugary drink with their meals. The average Mexican consumes 728 eight-ounce sugary drinks from Coca-Cola per year, an average of two a day, far more than the 403 eight-ounce drinks that are consumed per person annually in the United States.
“Coca-Cola is a great villain, but it is not the only one,” Avila said, adding that some 30 of Mexico’s 500 largest businesses produce snacks or other types of junk food, carbonated or sugary beverages. He said their total annual sales top $80 billion and their advertising and lobbying budgets easily trump public health campaigns.
A 2012 federal health and nutrition survey found that 64 percent of men and 82 percent of women in Mexico were overweight or obese. Obesity levels have tripled in the past three decades.
“I’m looking out my window,” said Dr. Stan De Loach, an American-certified diabetes educator who has lived most his life in Mexico, “and I see two, three, four, seven, eight people out of maybe 20 people who are obese.”
Mexico now has higher obesity rates among children ages 5 to 11 years than any other country. According to a 2012 health survey, 34.4 percent of children are obese, Ortiz said. The comparable figure in the United States is 16.9 percent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The paleo diet has not caught on there yet. Apparently.
ReplyDeleteBlog:
ReplyDelete"soaring obesity and shifting demographics that will heavily burden health systems."
Namely, our health system, thanks to Obamacare.
And with Obamacare, amnesty and continued lack of border enforcement, I imagine Americans will shoulder the lion's share of the cost associated with Mexico's obesity problem.
ReplyDeleteJust wait until the newly minted citizens exercise their right of family reunification. I wonder how many obese Mexicans will get in on that alone.
"The average Mexican consumes 728 eight-ounce sugary drinks from Coca-Cola per year"
ReplyDeleteMexico makes their Coca-Cola with real sugar, not hfcs like we do.
Because it tastes better, hipsters smuggle in large amounts of Mexican Coke.
Since tap water is widely considered unsafe, and public drinking fountains rare, most Mexicans swill a sugary drink with their meals. The average Mexican consumes 728 eight-ounce sugary drinks from Coca-Cola per year, an average of two a day, far more than the 403 eight-ounce drinks that are consumed per person annually in the United States.
ReplyDeleteAnd as our population zooms towards 400 million and more, will our tap water be widely considered unsafe too?
Isn't this the issue environmentalists, or at least conservationists, should be addressing?
It's the fructose in the sodas.
ReplyDelete1/ Look at this positively. We have developed the first society in history where being fat is more related to being poor than rich. As recently as the early twentieth century the rich reveled in their plumpitude.
ReplyDeleteThat's an improvement.
2/ You realize you are helping Mayor Bloomberg in his quest-one of them anyways.
I haven't heard any mainstream source argue that Mexicans are starving. I'm sure someone has said that at some point, it's just not an argument one runs into with any regularity. Steve likes to burn straw men.
ReplyDeleteThey should drink more red wine.
ReplyDeleteMost Mexicans are obese so I don't understand how California is one of the least obese states. Maybe there's enough skinny white people to keep the obesity rate low, but that sure seems unlikely given the number of Mexicans.
ReplyDeleteA lot of low income Americans and Mexicans probably eat fatter food since its cheaper but i agree there are few Mexicans and even fewer Americans contrary to liberal myth that are starving.
ReplyDeleteOn the east coast it's Puerto Ricans that are having this problem. By the way, that photo is hilarious!
ReplyDeleteThis is somehow whitey's fault.
I blogged on this too yesterday:
ReplyDeleteMexico’s Diabetes Epidemic
http://occamsrazormag.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/mexicos-diebetes-epidemic/
..
They need to move to New York City, where Micheal Bloomberg will cure them of their sugar addictions, and in return, the shores of Manhattan will glow in vibrancy.
ReplyDeleteThe article blames Mexican obesity partially on having to eat take-out food rather than go home for a meal of fresh produce, and having to drink soda pop because the water is unsafe.
ReplyDeleteI noticed a similar theme on a recent CNN special about healthcare issues in the US--the tendency of people to prefer greasy fast food over salads was ascribed to the cost differential--a cheeseburger at MacDonalds is cheaper than a salad.
The deep thinkers are once again kidding themselves. People eat the crap they eat because it appeals to them more. How about this example of a cost differential: my teenaged daughter will forgo a salad at home, where the ingredients are free, for a meal at MacDonalds, where she has to pay for it.
The deep thinkers are emotionally committed to absolving fat, unemployed, crime-prone poor people of any responsibility for their decisions.
My understanding is that hispanics in the US have higher than average rates of obesity and diabetes. This is probably more genetic than cultural. Too much fast food and soda and cigarrettes and liquor are bad for everyone, but there are some people who, thanks to their genetics, are especially susceptible.
ReplyDelete'Risk' isn't the same as 'realized'. Plenty of fat people never develop type 2 diabetes. So why not simply report the number of people who either have the disease or who died from it. Can it be that reality isn't as scary as they would want it to be?
ReplyDeleteThe fatter they are, the less able they are to scurry through the tunnels or climb the fence. Let's hope they get even fatter.
ReplyDeleteAnd as our population zooms towards 400 million and more, will our tap water be widely considered unsafe too?
ReplyDeleteDepends who's running the water agencies.... Ditto for other utilities and other elements of the nation's infrastructure.
Regarding California, Whites are now a minority and from what I can see they are plenty fat. It is possible that it is the Asians who are skewing the obesity rate downward. I am puzzled by how few Asians are overweight, and I think there are a lot more living here than the official numbers suggest. You can drive 5 miles in a straight line in the San Gabriel area of Los Angeles alone and almost every business sign is in Chinese. You see analagous phenomenon in Korean or Vietnamese areas of Southern California. If you don't live in this area you can't appreciate how laughably low the governments estimates of total immigration levels are.
ReplyDeleteSteve likes to burn straw men.
ReplyDeleteThe takeaway point which eludes you is that there is no moral high ground on the issue of Mexican immigration. Clearly, Mexicans have surplus calories and nobody is dying outside the border fence but for those heartless Americans.
IOW, they are coming here for the iPhones and chromed rims.
But ... Nicky Diaz assured me that they were coming here to escape starvation!
ReplyDeleteIf it's true that too Mexicans are fat, liberals will argue that Mexicans should be allowed to come here to LOSE weight. All that walking through the desert and climbing over fence will be promoted as 'right to exercise'. I mean you don't wanna take away their right to fitness, do you?
ReplyDeleteThe article blames Mexican obesity partially on having to eat take-out food rather than go home for a meal of fresh produce, and having to drink soda pop because the water is unsafe.
ReplyDeleteCan't they drink diet soda instead, and trade obesity for aspartame poisoning?
This was published in the New Zealand Herald in 2006. It's scaremongering, but interesting nonethess.
ReplyDeleteDiabetes could wipe out Maori and Polynesian Islanders by the end of the century, according to an international expert in the disease.
Professor Martin Silink, head of the Brussels-based International Diabetes Foundation, told a gathering of experts in Melbourne that indigenous people had a greater genetic risk of contracting type 2 diabetes, which was often undiagnosed.
Western lifestyles and diets had replaced traditional habits, exacerbating the problem.
"They also have the genes that make the diabetes more damaging, so they are more prone to develop the serious complications of diabetes," Prof Silink said.
Conference host Professor Paul Zimmet said diabetes was unknown in the Pacific before World War 2, but now the region had some of the highest rates in the world and where the existence of indigenous communities were at risk.
"It is a tragic situation, but not a lost one," he said.
Extinction was a "very real reality" and New Zealand's Maori and Pacific Island populations were just as much at risk as Australia's Aborigines and native Indians in the United States and Canada, he said.
Mexico City is full of mostly skinny people. Just over the hills in rural Cholula i once counted forty people in a row in the city plaza that were obese. There were men, women, children, and old ladies, each one a giant plumper.
ReplyDeleteWhen I go to rural towns with my girlfriend, she likes to hang around people watching and ask me weather I think each of the local women is pregnant or just fat. You'd never be able to play a game like that in Mexico City or a wealthy commercial-intellectual center because Mexicans there aren't obese.
So the prole divide controls obesity in Mexico just as in the USA.
The article blames Mexican obesity partially on having to eat take-out food rather than go home for a meal of fresh produce
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's just stupid. There's no fast food or packaged food that's cheaper than a baked potato and salad prepared at home. For that matter, not much fast food is cheaper than a steak cooked at home, calorie for calorie, especially if you stick to the cheaper cuts of meat.
If there's a causality arrow between poverty and junk food at all, I suspect it goes the other direction: people don't eat junk food because they're poor; they're poor because they eat junk food, which is expensive and unhealthy, making them poorer. (More likely, they're both caused by a third factor, like poor decision making ability.)
When mexicans are fat, they really look fat. Taller blacks and whites can be fat but it can at least have some stature.
ReplyDeleteBut when mexers are fat, they just look squat like this dog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jao0qbOYXjY
Life expectancy in Mexico isn't that much different from life expectancy in America: 75.84 years (Mexico) vs. 77.8 years (USA). Of course Mexican-Americans almost certainly have a lower life expectancy than the US average, so it's probably roughly the same for both countries. No, Mexicans aren't starving.
ReplyDeleteToo much fast food and soda and cigarrettes and liquor are bad for everyone, but there are some people who, thanks to their genetics, are especially susceptible
ReplyDeleteFor those with pre-industrial metabolisms, moderate tobacco smoking might not be that bad. For those populations, weight-related disease might be so bad that the increased risk of lung cancer might be an acceptable trade-off. Central American aboriginals in particular have good resistance to tobacco-related disease. Moral of the story: people are people, but subgroups exist, and Anglo health "laws" need not apply to other such groups.
"I haven't heard any mainstream source argue that Mexicans are starving. I'm sure someone has said that at some point, it's just not an argument one runs into with any regularity."
ReplyDeleteAre you nuts? 'Mexicans come here because they're poor and starving' is the implicit or explicit argument in many a pro-open borders rant.
"Diabetes could wipe out Maori and Polynesian Islanders by the end of the century, according to an international expert in the disease."
Good luck with that. I live in a state with lots of Polynesians. Every Polynesian I've known had 6-8 children.
I can't think of anything good about Mexico. Probably the best argument against Mexican immigration.
ReplyDeleteIn Jared Diamond's latest book The World Until Yesterday on page 448 he observes that Europeans have relatively low rates of diabetes compared to other racial groups that live on a rich Western diet and enjoy a sedentary Western lifestyle. Since Westerners have been living this way for several centuries, natural selection has built up a genetic resistance to diabetes in Europeans. Amer-Indians, Asian-Indians and other non-Europeans should catch up to Europeans in terms of diabetes resistance in a few hundred years, so diabetes shouldn't be thought of as a permanent burden on Medicare and Medicaid.
ReplyDelete"other non-Europeans should catch up to Europeans in terms of diabetes resistance in a few hundred years, so diabetes shouldn't be thought of as a permanent burden on Medicare and Medicaid."
ReplyDeleteI'm speechless.
And as our population zooms towards 400 million and more, will our tap water be widely considered unsafe too?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure you can assume there will be tap water. Water is a finite resource.
"IOW, they are coming here for the iPhones and chromed rims."
ReplyDeleteNot only that but healthcare for them, including donated kidneys for their diabetes complications.
Life expectancy in Mexico isn't that much different from life expectancy in America: 75.84 years (Mexico) vs. 77.8 years (USA). Of course Mexican-Americans almost certainly have a lower life expectancy than the US average, so it's probably roughly the same for both countries. No, Mexicans aren't starving. Incorrect, Mexicans in the US live above the average. In California Mexicans live 2 years longer than whties around 82 years old. I don't hav ethe figure for Texas but bieng poorer doesn't mean that Mexicans live short in the US.
ReplyDelete"will our tap water be widely considered unsafe too?" - Pour your tap water into a white cup and shine a light on it. If you can see bits floating around, you should probably boil it before drinking.
ReplyDeleteThe long-term answer is gene therapy, but try telling that to holier-than-thou bio-luddites.
ReplyDeleteIf the poor eat fast food because it's cheaper (it isn't, but let's play along), and the poor are fatasses, why on Earth do they need to save money on food? The reason to buy cheap is so you have money left over to feed yourself, and seeing as the poor are more than capable of feeding themselves to their heart's (dis)content, what do they need that money for? Never mind that obesity isn't exactly cheap. In other words, the poor have poor judgment. Shocking.
ReplyDelete