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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).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:13PM (3 children)
It's curious how you think nutrition is so simple and most people are dummies. I've had a low BMI forever, and used to eat a lot of carbs, but switched to more fat lately. And I mix plenty of whole milk into my coffee, because I prefer the taste. As someone who doesn't have particularly good self-discipline, I suspect genetics play a large role, and many people will be driven toward obesity due to biology. Its a sensible urge for a world where food was scarce until recently.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:26PM
* In this case it's as simple as: "don't eat low quality mass manufactured fast food on a weekly basis" and "soda is bad for you"
* Yes. Most people are dummies.
* BMI is a useless metric.
* There are different types of carbs. Notice how I said people ate carbs and fat together before modern fast food. The carb that is problematic is sugar. Up until a hundred years or so ago, sugar was a novelty and treat. Now it's added to everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @07:17PM
When you have an over-simplified world view, everyone is an idiot for not seeing it as clearly as you. Five or ten years from now he'll be proselytizing on the latest "obvious" dietary fix for the plain, stupid folk, which will turn out to be different than the "obvious" issues today, which are different than the obvious issues from yesterday. Your problem is that you are too dense to see that it is all about the fats. Or the carbs. Or the anti-oxidants. Fish oil! It is because we eat too little fish oil! I'm betting on amino acids. We're consuming too many , or too few, I don't know, but I'll let you know in 5 to 10 years when it is noticed that some isolated restricted diet society is thin and we over extrapolate on what they're eating.
So even though you are obviously too thick to see this, you are correct that the predominant factor in health is the individual biochemistry [metro.co.uk].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @09:57PM