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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: 1) by HighOrbit on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:09PM (2 children)
You've hit the nail on the head. It's not caused by fast food per se, it is the drastic economic and societal changes in the lifestyle. Before development and modernity, in every society in the world people lived subsistence lifestyles where the challenge was to get enough calories to survive while also doing at least 12 hours daily of heavy physical labor. Now in just a few generations, they have a massive caloric surplus while doing no more than 8 hours labor and often no physical labor or exercise at all. Even if they maintained the same traditional or rustic diet and were never introduced to KFC or any other fast food, rising rates of obesity would be inevitable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @05:27PM (1 child)
Well, Japan is also very rich, and they are not fat.. so there might be more to it than that..
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 04 2017, @07:15PM
The portions are much smaller, and the cuisine is far less fatty.
Obesity is rising in Japan, too, though, and there it too is linked to Western chains like Mr Donuts and MakuDonarudozu (McDonald's).
Washington DC delenda est.