The Startling Rise in Obesity:
A Study of the Crisis in Mexico
At one time, Mexico was one of the healthiest countries in the world, mainly because the food they ate was nearly all hand-made and home-grown, and most of the population was physically active on their family land each day. In modern Mexico, however, times are changing rapidly, and obesity and its related diseases are dramatically on the rise. Prevention has been found to be key, and simply treating the disease and its symptoms ineffective.
Furthermore, multiple studies have concluded that obesity has less to do with the individual and more to do with the very environment each person finds themselves in, namely poverty, unemployment, and a food-system now entrenched with commercialized and processed foods. Programs to combat poverty and socioeconomic problems, providing education and knowledge on how to make healthy-food choices, and more physical daily movement are appearing to offer more viable and long-term solutions to overcome this current health crisis in Mexico.
Poverty has been shown to be a direct link to obesity, and poverty is wide-spread throughout areas of Mexico. Much of this poverty is due to the commercialization of farming, not only driving the once-prevalent small family farms to sell their home-grown products at a severely discounted rate, but also forcing many farms to completely close, unable to compete with the industrialized-farming giants and their much-less-expensive commercialized products being sold in the big-chain grocery stores (Wilhelm 18-20). Wilhelm writes that “peasants in the rural areas outside of Mexico City are essentially forced into migration as a result of limited economic opportunity in the rural areas” (20).
The Mexican government has implemented many programs in an attempt to combat obesity, including installing exercise machines in urban centres, a sales tax on soda, and even fining schools for serving soft drinks, but obesity is still on the rise (Wilhelm, 4,6,10). Wilhelm has found that the public health crisis of obesity is not as simple as prescribing more gym-time and less soda; instead, it is a result of underlying political economy issues (4). These issues include "poverty, unemployment, migration, and in particular, the loss of farmers’ jobs in Mexico. Public policy functions to treat the symptoms of the public health crisis do not fully acknowledging the root causes of the crisis” (4).
Levasseur has conducted research on the “Conditional Cash Transfers” (CTT) program currently offered in Mexico, which offers cash incentives to combat hunger along with extreme and chronic poverty (145). This program has been proven to be one of the most “successful and ambitious around the world” regarding capital and poverty indicators and has more recently been studied by Levasseur for the possibility of simultaneously reducing obesity through the same incentive system (144). The conclusions of this study directly support Levasseur’s belief that poverty and obesity are directly and irrevocably related (152). Socioeconomic programs such as the CTT program in Mexico offer strong evidence to support more time, money and effort should be placed on refining and expanding these types of programs that offer a real solution to poverty and therefore obesity.
Home-grown food is naturally healthier, but it was not something a person had to “learn” or “know” about in the past. Food was simply grown or raised and then eaten. As that aspect of life changed for Mexico, and people moved to urban settings, they started eating fast food, commercial food, and processed food (Marron-Ponce et al). Significant over-consumption of soft drinks, potato chips, candy, and sweets have markedly impacted the health of Mexicans and their quality of life (Wilhelm 2).
There is evidence that many Mexicans have little knowledge or information about what constitutes “healthy” eating, and there appears to be a strong link between a lack of whole-foods education and the rising obesity rates (Levasseur 146). To highlight how grave of a situation Mexico currently has regarding their fight against obesity, one can look at their soda consumption: “Mexico is the greatest consumer of soda in the world with an average of 46 gallons per person per year—86% more than the average American” (Wilhelm 6). The success of the (aforementioned) CTT program, that offers training on healthy-food choices as one of their cash incentives, is an example of how education directly impacts obesity in Mexico: as people learn to make new eating choices, their weight correspondingly drops.
As the rural farming communities of Mexico started moving to urban centres, their way of life changed dramatically: most people now spend their days virtually sedentary. Their physical output has decreased substantially, yet the calories consumed are not always altered. Life in the urban centres of Mexico come at a high cost for many Mexicans: economic and employment opportunities in the cities cannot support the levels of migration from the rural areas, and Mexicans are left in worse poverty than they had in the countryside (Wilhelm 20).
Wilhelm has found that industrialized farming has caused job losses for millions of Mexicans, leaving already extremely-poor areas with no infrastructure, and skyrocketing agricultural unemployment (20). Now ensconced in the urban settings, Mexicans are no longer eating their natural foods and have started consuming the very commercialized products that has forced them off their family farms. Wilhelm writes that obesity is a direct result of these nutritional changes in the past few generations, including increased consumption of sugar, refined carbohydrates, processed foods, and sodas (2). They cite the Public Health Nutrition of Mexico: “Access to inexpensive but high energy-dense food is rising and physical activity is decreasing, since large numbers of people now live in urban areas and are engaged in less physical activity” (2).
Marron-Ponce et al confirms this link between urbanization and obesity: as the cities are flooded with new residents, demand for inexpensive food rises, and supermarkets, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants snatch up their share of the market. It appears that obesity is a health crisis with the clear potential for prevention and reversal, yet it seems little is being done on a socioeconomic or political level to deal with the negative results of mass urbanization in Mexico. With the shift from rural life to urban life, Mexico and its citizens must find new ways to combat a sedentary lifestyle and resist the commercialized and processed foods they now find at their immediate disposal.
Despite Mexico making a wide variety of changes to its public policies to combat obesity, such as the tax on soft drinks, obesity continues to rise instead of lower. The fact is that obesity has been proven to be a socioeconomic problem resulting as a direct link to the high poverty rates in Mexico. With the high poverty rates comes a correlation to a lack of current education on what constitutes “healthy” food choices. The influx of inexpensive commercialized products into their country has left the cash-poor citizens of Mexico nearly forced to purchase these lower-priced commercial products.
Forced from their family farms, a high percentage of the citizens of Mexico have become sedentary and without employment or direction. Attempting to combat obesity or its symptoms in and of itself is not dealing with the root or causal issues that plague Mexico. Studies have continually proven that attempting to convince people to eat less or exercise more is not a sustainable or effective way to deal with obesity.
Mexico must find new ways to address their current health crisis: they must look outside of the more recent models that have offered neither solutions nor success. Evidence shows that Mexico must expand their socioeconomic programs to combat poverty and reduce consumption of processed foods, while supporting a healthier and more sustainable local-farm movement back into existence.
Works Cited
Levasseur, Pierre. “Can social programs break the vicious cycle between poverty and obesity? Evidence from urban Mexico.” Science Direct – World Development, Vol. 113, Jan 2019, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18303279?via%3Dihub. Accessed 3 June 2019.
Marrón-Ponce, Joaquín Alejandro et al. “Trends in Ultra-Processed Food Purchases from 1984 to 2016 in Mexican Households.” Nutrients, vol. 11 (1), no. 45, 26 Dec. 2018, doi:10.3390/nu11010045. Accessed 3 June 2019.
Wilhelm, Haley M. “Tipping the Scales: The Public Health Crisis in Mexico.” Scripps Senior Theses, Paper 733, 2016, scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1826&context=scripps_theses. Accessed 5 June 2019.