American Way of Life: Mexico has an obesity problem

Same food, same problems: Mexico is experiencing an obesity epidemic similar to that in the United States. In the fight for healthier food, civil society meets the unhealthy eating habits of the citizens and the resistance of the food companies.

Obesity has increased rapidly in Mexico since the turn of the millennium.

Richard Baker/Getty

Manuel Uribe already weighed 130 kilos when he moved from Monterrey, Mexico to Dallas, Texas at a young age. There, the snack bar lured in next to his job with pizza, hamburgers and fried chicken. He doubled his weight in ten years. The fault is probably the American way of life, eating a lot with little exercise, he thought and moved back to Mexico.

There he doubled his weight again within a few years. In addition to pizza, he now ate Mexican tacos. In the morning, his mother made him “a good breakfast” while he drank “refrescos” (soft drinks like cola and fanta), as seen in the 2007 documentary “El hombre de 560 kilos” (The 560-kilo Man). . The understanding mom explains that he has an insatiable craving. The “Guinness Book” even listed Uribe as the fattest person in the world at 597 kilos.

Mexicans love fast food and junk food; the streets are paved with hamburger, pizza and taco stands, and people drink “refresco”. American fast-food chains also dominate in the shopping centers. One encounters mothers who give the little ones a baby bottle full of Fanta. Or youngsters wolfing down fat-soaked hamburgers or tacos. Plus a bottle of Coca-Cola. Of course, such eating and drinking habits are not without consequences.

obesity epidemic

Three out of four Mexicans are overweight, and a good 30 percent are obese. This is a fierce battle with the USA for the top position in obesity. In 2017, Mexico briefly overtook the US as the world’s No. 1. It is currently No. 2. It retains the top spot for childhood obesity. Around 36 percent of 5 to 11 year olds and 38 percent of 12 to 19 year olds are affected. Mexicans once again gained significant weight during the pandemic, by an average of 8.5 kilos – the highest value in the world.

The ten countries with the highest rates of obesity

Millions of Mexicans get their food every day from Oxxo, whose red and yellow advertising signs shine on every corner. The supermarkets are open 24/7, ideal for those late-night hunger pangs. Chips and peanuts await at the entrance, behind them a variety of chocolate products. On the wall, refrigerators keep beer, soft drinks and industrialized fruit juices ready. If you need harder alcohol and cigarettes, you will find them at the checkout. In the back area you can heat up pizza, tacos or hamburgers in the microwave oven. After all, with luck you will find one or the other apple or banana.

“Oxxo is a cancer that is spreading across the country,” says Alejandro Calvillo of the consumer protection organization El Poder del Consumidor (The Power of Consumers). Step by step, the supermarket chain is taking over the old, traditional grocery stores and thereby reducing the range. Fresh fruit and vegetables are becoming increasingly rare, their consumption is now a third lower than twenty years ago, and that of beans by half. At the same time, sugar consumption has roughly doubled. Today, the “comida chatarra” dominates, industrialized food full of salt, sugar, fat and artificial ingredients.

El Poder del Consumidor is part of an alliance of organizations that have been fighting for healthier eating and drinking habits for years. In Mexico City, drinking water dispensers were set up at metro stations and public places. Now they are fighting for a ban on the “comida chatarra” in schools. The schoolyards are teeming with street vendors who sell chips, hamburgers and soft drinks to the students.

163 liters of Coca-Cola per capita

Mexico is the Latin American country with the largest consumption of industrialized food. When it comes to the consumption of Coca-Cola, it is even number 1 in the world, with 163 liters per capita per year. “It goes so far that there are villages without drinking water, but there is no shortage of Coca-Cola,” says Calvillo. Sugar consumption has consequences. Mexico is a global leader in diseases of affluence such as type 2 diabetes, especially childhood diabetes, cancer, strokes and high blood pressure.

In 2016, the government declared an epidemiological emergency in response to rising obesity and diabetes. Nevertheless, diabetes, which affects around 10 percent of the population, has long been the number 1 cause of death, with 150,000 deaths in 2020. In addition, thousands of patients from these risk groups died from Covid during the pandemic.

Mexico is actually a country with cultural and culinary wealth. In 2010, Unesco declared Mexico’s cuisine an Intangible World Heritage Site for its “practical rituals, ancient practical knowledge and age-old culinary techniques and customs”. As in the times of the Aztecs, the basis of the diet consists of the trinity of corn, beans and chili. In addition, they rely on fresh products, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Corn has always been at the center of Mexican cuisine, both as the basis of nutrition and as a religious focus. In Aztec mythology, corn is considered the origin of man and symbolizes several gods of fertility. Traditional tortillas and tacos are made from corn. Today you can get them in the fast food chains in the cheap combination with soft drinks.

Radical change in eating habits

The health implications of the American way of life have long been known. Long-term studies conducted on the Pima indigenous people since the 1990s are unequivocal. The Pima live in both the southern United States and northern Mexico. Exposed to modern life and industrialized food in the United States, the Pima have rates of obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes, between seven and ten times higher than their farming relatives in Mexico.

Calvillo recalls that most Mexicans were still slim in the 1980s. However, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was launched in 1994, the customs of the American Way completely spilled over to Mexico. The agreement, which also includes Canada, affected smallholder Mexican agriculture. Subsidized bulk products from the US flooded the market, with devastating consequences for Mexican corn producers, but also for livestock and poultry farmers.

With the Nafta, the large American supermarket chains such as Walmart and 7Eleven also expanded rapidly in Mexico. Today they are the biggest competition for the Oxxo retail chain, founded in 1978 in Monterrey, Mexico. Behind the chain is the large corporation Fomento Económico Mexicano S.A.B. de CV, or Femsa for short, which is active in the soft drink market through Coca-Cola Femsa. This is the world’s second largest bottler of Coca-Cola products and the market leader in Latin America. In Switzerland, Femsa recently made a takeover bid for the kiosk group Valora.

Activists monitored with spy software

El Poder del Consumidor felt the power of the soft drinks industry when they advocated the introduction of a “sugar tax” on soft drinks in 2014. Suddenly strange things happened: Alejandro Calvillo and other activists received threats via text messages and emails. Their cellphones were also hacked.

The New York Times revealed in 2016 that the phones were infected with the Israeli spy software Pegasus. The branch association of the Mexican soft drinks industry ConMéxico, in which Coca-Cola and Pepsico are also represented, denied any connection to the case.

At the same time, a trail led into Mexican politics. In 2015, for example, the mobile phone of a journalist who had reported on scandals involving the then Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto was hacked. The government reportedly bought Pegasus from Israeli developer NSO in 2014 for $15 million. But to this day, the «caso Pegasus» has still not been fully elucidated. Did business and politics pull together in the fight against the “sugar tax”?

This would not be unusual in Mexico. Politics and entrepreneurship are in Mexico very closely intertwined. The influence of the soft drink industry is particularly large. Former President Vicente Fox (2000-2006) was Coca-Cola’s Latin America boss before he entered politics, and his predecessor Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) was an advisor to the company after he left the presidency.

Thanks to its economic power, Femsa has great political clout in Mexico. The company has close ties to government agencies, with executives frequently rotating between government and corporate roles. This phenomenon is known in Mexico as “puertas giratorias” (revolving doors).

Apparently there is a lack of movement

In the US, too, the soft drinks industry resisted when civil society there launched campaigns to introduce a “sugar tax” around 2010. The industry pumped millions into marketing campaigns that had a clear message: not sugar, but a lack of exercise is responsible for the fat wave. One should move more in order to balance the energy balance, it was said in commercials. At the same time, in 2010, Coca-Cola began printing nutritional warnings on its packaging. Instead of taxes or bans, the responsible citizen should be responsible for informing themselves, according to the embassy.

The Peña Nieto government also relied on these supposedly responsible citizens and made labeling on food packages mandatory in 2014. Guide values ​​were given that compare one portion of food to an “average daily requirement”. Tests were done with nutrition science students, who were supposed to calculate their daily consumption based on the information on the packaging, says Calvillo, but even they couldn’t do it.

Instead of guidelines, the nutrition activists advocated simple, clearly understandable warning labels. With success. Since 2020, labels have simply warned of a dangerous excess of calories, sugar or salt. “That’s what normal people understand,” Calvillo sums up. Will this help get rid of obesity? If not, there are also economic consequences. The OECD estimates that Mexico could lose more than 5 percent of economic growth between 2020 and 2050 as a result of the obesity epidemic.

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