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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 04 2017, @07:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the wanting-to-be-fat-cats dept.

Obesity Was Rising as Ghana Embraced Fast Food. Then Came KFC.

Ghana, a coastal African country of more than 28 million still etched with pockets of extreme poverty, has enjoyed unprecedented national prosperity in the last decade, buoyed by offshore oil. Though the economy slowed abruptly not long ago, it is rebounding and the signs of new fortune are evident: millions moving to cities for jobs, shopping malls popping up and fast food roaring in to greet people hungry for a contemporary lifestyle.

Chief among the corporate players is KFC, and its parent company, YUM!, which have muscled northward from South Africa — where KFC has about 850 outlets and a powerful brand name — throughout sub-Saharan Africa: to Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and beyond. The company brings the flavors that have made it popular in the West, seasoned with an intangible: the symbolic association of fast food with rich nations.

But KFC's expansion here comes as obesity and related health problems have been surging. Public health officials see fried chicken, french fries and pizza as spurring and intensifying a global obesity epidemic that has hit hard in Ghana — one of 73 countries where obesity has at least doubled since 1980. In that period, Ghana's obesity rates have surged more than 650 percent, from less than 2 percent of the population to 13.6 percent, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research center at the University of Washington.

The U.S. had a 13% obesity rate in 1962. The CDC estimated that 36.5-37.7% of U.S. adults aged 20+ were obese in 2014 (17% of children/teenagers aged 2-19).


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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:59PM (2 children)

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:59PM (#577018) Journal

    Intake amount is certainly a factor, no doubt. But in my opinion, regardless of intake, putting sugar in of any meal or beverage makes it bad for you.

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  • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:21PM

    by Hartree (195) on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:21PM (#577074)

    "But in my opinion, regardless of intake, putting sugar in of any meal or beverage makes it bad for you."

    Ah. So dropping one crystal of sugar into a glass of water makes it bad for you.

    This is the philosophical basis for contagion theory based magic and homeopathy.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:27PM (#577113)

    It doesn't help, you are right. But neither does "stamping out hunger." Humans evolved to be fucking hungry. If you are never really hungry because food is everywhere and you can eat within 2 minutes of not being full, let alone being actually hungry, then that fucks things up big time. I'm starting to think that culture that promote religious fasting actually have something right.