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While I'm sure that growth hormones and such are problematical, a complication with the obesity debate is that it is often skewed by US food production habits. While the yankees may be the fattest population on the planet that is changing as a recent Lancet report confirms. http://www.sciencecodex.com/the_lancet_most_comprehensive_global_study_to_date_shows_obesity_rates_climbing_worldwide-134543 "Worldwide, there has been a startling increase in rates of obesity and overweight in both adults (28% increase) and children (up by 47%) in the past 33 years, with the number of overweight and obese people rising from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013, according to a major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013, published in The Lancet. However, the rates vary widely throughout the world with more than half of the world's 671 million obese individuals living in just ten countries--the USA (more than 13%), China and India (15% combined), Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany , Pakistan, and Indonesia, and (listed in order of number of obese individuals). Over the past three decades, the highest rises in obesity levels among women have been in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Honduras and Bahrain, and among men in New Zealand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the USA. In high-income countries, some of the highest increases in adult obesity prevalence have been in the USA (where roughly a third of the adult population are obese), Australia (where 28% of men and 30% of women are obese), and the UK (where around a quarter of the adult population are obese)." My point is that explaining this international phenomenon isn't an easy call, reduced to a few epidemiological elements. That the rise dovetails with the victories of neoliberalist ideology is an interesting association. As one commentator remarked: "Commenting on the implications of the study, Professor Klim McPherson from Oxford University in the UK writes, "An appropriate rebalancing of the primal needs of humans with food availability is essential, which would entail curtailing many aspects of production and marketing for food industries. To prevent unsustainable health consequences, BMI needs to return to what it was 30 years ago. Lobstein calculated that to reduce BMI to 1980 levels in the UK would require an 8% reduction in consumption across the country, costing the food industry roughly £8*7 billion per year." And that, in itself, tells us heaps about the needs of capitalism to not only engorge us, but foster addictions...separate from issues of industrial agriculture. Another feature I think is that with its control over every aspect of our menu, capitalism has alienated us from our food and the wisdom of 'traditional diets' have been lost. Increasing commodification of food has reduced it to so many 'stared' or featured components. and the holistic wisdom of a whole cuisine is being lost. This begins to explain why indigenous people suffer massive rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity in transiting from their traditional tucker to the western diet. The same phenomenon is being recorded as the Mediterranean diet ('diets' actually) loses traction in Mediterranean countries. See background Here:http://dietamediterranea.com/ Indeed when you consider traditional diets -- diets that have some generic standing measured in hundreds if not thousands of years -- they don't necessary have many 'components' in common. How much meat, the amount of starch, or fiber, of seafood, of whatever...varies so much -- ethnicity to ethnicity/culture to culture, region to region. I think the food ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan does have a useful argument when he merges acculturation, diet, environment and genetics.You only have to consider lactose intolerance as a marker of this prospect., and then note that the folk like the Turkish peoples, worked around their 30% penchant by inventing yogurt and how that product is deployed in meals, as their neighbours may use wine or olives or vinegar. Those of us from a Celtic background come from a cuisine contained by milk, potatoes, and oatmeal for three hundred years and from all accounts did pretty well until the supplies dried up...and we all know about the famine. But get a load of this. Indians may be diabetes prone (another genetic marker) but....: "India is bracing for a massive surge in type 2 diabetes, with credible estimates putting the number of sufferers in the next 20 years at more than 100 million. It is a frightening phenomenon that threatens to overwhelm the country's health system, according to a leading diabetes specialist in India. Between them, India and China now have more than half of the world's type 2 diabetics. " http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-23/obesity-produces-diabetes-epidemic-in-india/4148616 Then we have the contrary phenomenon that in Cuba during the Special Period, once dietary deficiencies were covered the health of Cubans improved during the shortages as their collective weight went down.. http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/04april/pages/hard-times-in-cuba-linked-to-better-national-health.aspx "These factors contributed to an average weight reduction per citizen of 5.5kg over the course of the five-year economic crisis. During this time there was a significant drop in prevalence of, and deaths due to, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and cancers. But once the crisis was over and people started to eat more and exercise less, these trends began to reverse." dave riley ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
