Week 13: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight

1. Mark Whitaker

2. Denying the "Human Genetic-Cultural-Regional Food" History of the World is why people are getting sicker on the same globalized food. As the markets are destroyed for regional cuisines, there are global health problems of demoting these while changing to a common industrialized diet of fewer food regional choices. It is more than just a loss of regional options: it is a genetic issue of our bodies themselves, our "Regionalized Metabolism. Let's call it "Nabhan's Revenge"--though he calls it "evolutionary gastronomy".

The story below is a good example of leaving out this "evolutionary gastronomy. In "The Ten Fattest Countries in the World" it leaves something out. It leaves out "Nabhan's Revenge", how if you eat outside of your traditional regional cuisine you are at greater risk of health problems because there are human genetic mechanisms that have built up over time into 'demographics of regional genetics' in how we process our food (food metabolism genes) to handle a certain climate, its food chemicals and cultural choices as all intertwined.

So destroy the cultural ways of a region, and you destroy the interlinked specific regional food ways. In the process you sever your own genetic adaptability to keeping fit while eating a particular regional cuisine--a regional cuisine that might make others sick that keeps you healthy.

The journalist below is silent on the genetic mechanism why some people are getting fat on different foods. Her implied theory is based on assumptions that human genetics are all the same when it comes to our metabolism, so her indirect blame is simply "voluntary access" or a host of social policies and novel cultural habits. Like anything in the social world, there are many causal elements at play. However what she talks about is a more complicated issue that only political forces destroying regional cuisines or novel habits of youth.

It's nothing to do with only greater voluntary access to certain foods alone: it's because our diet over time became regionalized historically and 'culturalized', and our genetics followed suit as a dependent variable of the regional foodways instead of an independent causal variable.

Given "evolutionary gastronomy", our bodies are evolutionarily accustomed to certain foods over centuries and the cultural ways that were maintaining such foods.

In Nabhan's book, there are some amazing descriptions of how cultures and regional climates are the independent variable 'selecting for suitable dependent variables of genetics' to fit social adaptations, over time. (Typically people assume or talk about genetics as a determinist cause of things: Nabhan turns it around and provides examples of how genetics is a dependent variable, dependent upon cultural choices and regional food practices.) This interaction both cultural, food chemical, climatic, and human-genetic based generates a tightly locked interpenetration of a particular bioregional area--that we deny at our peril.

Remember the Mexican farmer in the film "The World According to Monsanto" and his long-term love of a particular region and its food.

Watch the optional films about European regionalism in foodways as well, many of them that fail to fit currently accepted "state cultural (sic), i.e., nationalist" borders either.

[In the packet:] Nabhan, Gary Paul. 2004. Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity. Washington, D.C.: Island Press / Shearwater Books.from ethnobotanist Nabhan, [on “evolutionary gastronomy”: the long-term biological/genetic and culinary chemical interaction as co-evolutionary: people, diet, and place, and genetics adapting to particular places and cuisines supported by particular areas over millennia]

OPTIONAL: videos on European Regional Cuisines

a. Savouring Europe - the Eastern Steppes – Hungary; November 2004 A huge grazing land alive with wild horses and cattle rounded up by cowboys; trout from the rivers and piles of red and orange paprika fill the kitchens of the inns and steaming goulash and thick sour cream are served in generous heaps.
25:26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM57DsyuLNg

b. Savouring Europe: Dorset – UK; November 2004 January-March: Winter is ending, the land comes alive with new season potatoes and is ploughed for early spring crops. The grassland's cycle begins; cheese and beer making and organic farming respond to the weather on the rolling hills which descend to the Atlantic where tiny boats ply for shellfish.
25:21
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcK-5ABdbsc

c. Savouring Europe - Sodermansland – Sweden; November 2004 Summer and boar and deer are provided to be smoked and cooked as treats; lake fish and eels are provided for the new Swedish chefs to demonstrate their take on traditions and people speak of their passing culture in the reflection of deep blue lakes.
25:28
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zeWK4XWyUA

d. [many more if you search for them there]



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Behold: the world's 10 fattest countries
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By Laurie Cunningham — Special to GlobalPost
Published: November 25, 2009 14:27 ET
Updated: November 26, 2009 09:31 ET

CHICAGO — If you tend to pack on a few pounds over the holidays, blame it on globalization [it's more complicated than that]. As the world [of food choices has 'de-regionalized'] has grown smaller, we’ve all grown larger — alarmingly so. In countries around the world, waistlines are expanding so rapidly that health experts recently coined a term for the epidemic: globesity.

The common fat-o-meter among nations is body mass index (BMI), a calculation based on a person’s height and weight.

The World Health Organization defines “overweight” as an individual with a BMI of 25 or more and “obese” as someone with a BMI of 30 or higher. (To see how you weigh in, use this calculator by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.)

Today, one in three of the world’s adults is overweight and one in 10 is obese. By 2015, WHO estimates the number of chubby adults will balloon to 2.3 billion — equal to the combined populations of China, Europe and the U.S.

The rise in obesity coincides with increased modernization and a worldwide explosion in the availability of highly processed foods [and the non-availability of others, and the interaction with our 'regional genetic predispositions']. In the past 50 years, more of us have started driving to work instead of walking, opening a box of mac ‘n cheese instead of cooking, pushing computer keys instead of plows and taking the elevator rather than the stairs. [Er, it's more complicated than that.]

“The combination of these factors is driving obesity all over the world,” said James Hospedales, coordinator for prevention and control of chronic diseases at the Pan American Health Organization. “What’s really alarming is that it’s not just the middle aged, it’s children and adolescents. That’s new.”

In honor of Thanksgiving, a U.S. holiday dedicated to eating until we can’t breathe, we decided to take a look at the Top 10 Fattest Countries in the world, based on national health surveys WHO compiled between 2000 and 2008.

Yes, it's a big world after all:

1) American Samoa, 93.5 percent (of population that's overweight) [highly genetic specific area, with its traditional cuisines and markets decimated]

Traditionally, Pacific Islanders ate native foods high in complex carbohydrates and low in fat, such as bananas, yams, taro root, coconut and fish. Since World War II, an explosion of obesity on the islands has corresponded with a rise in migration to the U.S., New Zealand, France and Australia [while their same genetic metabolisms were awash with entire different food chemicals and ratios in their diets]. That began to change dietary habits as family members abroad introduced those back home to Western eating and sent money home, giving locals the means to buy more food. Today, this six-island nation in the South Pacific Ocean tops the scales as one of the fattest in the world.

2) Kiribati, 81.5 percent [another isolated genetic population, swamped by other non-regionalized foods]

Between 1964 and 2001, food imports to the least developed Pacific nations, such as Kiribati, which comprises 33 islands clustered around the equator, increased six-fold, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a United Nations agency established to fight world hunger. Those imports led to a huge influx in fatty food and processed meat, such as Spam and mutton flaps (fatty sheep scraps), often sold at lower prices than native food. [i.e., demoting the markets for what genetically had made them healthier in the past.]

3) U.S., 66.7 percent [U.S. a nation of immigrants and Native American populations all scrambled in their historic regional "evolutionary gastronomy" more than any other place in the world?]

In the early 1960s, 24 percent of Americans were overweight. Today, two-thirds of Americans are too fat, and the numbers on the scale keep going up. Health experts attribute the rise to an over-production of oil, fat and sugar — the result of government farm subsidies started in the 1970s that made it much cheaper to manufacture products like high fructose corn syrup, a common ingredient in processed foods. “On top of that, investment policies changed in the early 1980s to require corporations to report growth to Wall Street every 90 days,” said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of the book “Food Politics.” “This made food companies seek new ways to market to the public. Obesity was collateral damage.” [The ignore the transfat issues that the body is unable to use: as well as how the 'corn-i-fication' of sugar products in the U.S. has contributed to this because of the different chemicals in corn syrup are pretty bad for the human system as a sugar.]

4) Germany, 66.5 percent

When Germany found out that it was the fattest nation in Europe, health experts blamed the usual suspects: beer, fatty foods and lack of physical activity. Like the rest of the world, Germans are suffering from an easy availability of junk food and more sedentary jobs and lifestyles. As part of the government’s campaign to reduce obesity levels by 2020, it has launched programs to serve more fruits and vegetables in public schools.

5) Egypt, 66 percent

In the 1960s, Egypt produced enough food to feed its people a steady diet of red meat, poultry, lentils, maize and dairy products. But by the 1980s, the population had outgrown food production, leading to an increase in food imports that created poorer eating habits. Obesity among Egyptian women is particularly high, often attributed to cultural taboos on women exercising or playing sports.

6) Bosnia-Herzegovina, 62.9 percent

Once considered a problem only in high-income countries, obesity is dramatically on the rise in low- and middle-income countries [once very culturally/culinarily isolated] like Bosnia-Herzegovina, where smoking, drinking and eating unhealthy foods spiked during the war that ravaged the country from 1992 to 1995. Those living just above the poverty line in developing countries are gaining weight the fastest, partly because of the tendency to fill up on cheap processed foods high in calories and low on nutritional value.

7) New Zealand, 62.7 percent

In a study at the University of Otago, researchers found that how much time New Zealand children spend watching television is a better predictor of obesity than what they eat or how much they exercise. The study found that 41 percent of the children who were overweight by age 26 were those who had watched the most TV. Television is not the only reason New Zealanders are gaining weight, but it’s one modern development often cited for growing childhood obesity.

8) Israel, 61.9 percent

In the past 30 years, the number of obese Israelis has tripled, evidence the country is truly part of the Western world. Like in most developed countries, flab is most prevalent among Israelis with less education, with Jewish women with college degrees having the lowest levels of obesity and Arab women with basic education having the highest.

9) Croatia, 61.4 percent

Croatia, where cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, is also a victim of the globalization of the food market, which tends to suppress traditional diets as cheaper processed foods from the U.S. and Europe flood store shelves. Unlike other Europeans, Croatian men have higher rates of obesity than Croatian women, and tend to get even fatter as they age. It’s no wonder that a Croatian charity announced in June that it had created the world’s largest pair of jeans — the size of six tennis courts — stitched together from 8,023 donated pairs of jeans.

10) United Kingdom, 61 percent

Last month, The Observer begrudgingly reported that the heaviest man in the world was not in the U.S., but a 48-year-old Brit living in low-incoming housing in Ipswich “eating takeaways and playing computer games.” His weight: 980 pounds. British bellies are expanding for the same reasons as everywhere else. A recent survey, however, ranked Brits among the bottom third of European nations in physical exercise, leading Health Secretary Andy Burnham to comment, "We're really in danger of being known as the best in the world for watching sport, but one of the worst for getting out there and doing it for ourselves."

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http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/commerce/091125/obesity-epidemic-fattest-countries