The Scales Tip Southward
For six weeks at the end of this past year, I had the gross misfortune of living and working in Yuma, Arizona, my apartment less than five miles from the US-Mexico border (in case you’re wondering, yes, there IS a fence). I won’t delve into all the specifics of why I found this particular town to be awful – the climate, unemployment numbers, and density of cockroaches speak for themselves – but the thing I found most appalling was the wildly unhealthy lifestyles of virtually everyone I encountered. One of the first things one of my coworkers – a HEALTH PROFESSIONAL – told me when I asked him about Yuma was that I was, without a doubt, going to gain weight during my time there. Later that day, when I mentioned I had walked to the facility that morning, I was met with blank stares and confusion across the board. My wife, who worked across the street, was consistently introduced to patients by her supervisor with the follow-up description, “She actually walks to work! Can you believe that?”. Besides the aversion to any scope of physical activity, the healthy food options were severely limited. The grocery stores left quite a bit to be desired (I once overheard the manager of our apartment building telling her subordinate that a Trader Joe’s would never be built in Yuma because the people who lived there weren’t smart enough to have one), and the vast majority of restaurants seemed to build their dishes on a solid base of grease and sodium. Even the authentic, family-style Mexican restaurants – filled not only with our “typical” expectations of burritos and salsa, but with delicious traditional soups and rice dishes – weren’t exactly designed for anyone watching their waistline. Despite our proximity to the border and the heavy Latino cultural influence on Yuma, I assumed the unhealthiness was mostly a product of an American bastardization of Mexican cuisine and lifestyle. As it turns out, we might all be in it together.
Last week, the headlines began emerging, initially from CBS and followed shortly by other outlets battling for a piece of the media pie, that Mexico had just overtaken the United States as the world’s fattest country – their words, not mine. The liberal use of the stigmatizing superlative “fattest” notwithstanding, these attention-grabbing headlines served as misleading entries into a series of articles that seemed to miss the point of the study on which they were reporting entirely. That study, entitled “The State of Food and Agriculture” and produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, was a nearly-one-hundred-page report and analysis of worldwide food systems, malnutrition, agricultural influences, consumer tendencies, and propositions for solutions to these global issues. It was well-written and well-researched, focusing on resolving societal problems that contribute to epidemic nutritional concerns.
So what did a good portion of the American media decide to do with this information? To paraphrase: “Hey guys! This number here says there’s another country nearby that’s fatter than us! WOOOOO!!!!”
Sigh.
For starters, let’s examine the figures in question that propelled us into second place. Rather than spending any time on the actual content of the report, the authors chose instead to focus on a singular column of a singular table in the statistical annex found after the article’s conclusion. This column – the prevalence of obesity found in a nation’s adult population measured in 2008 - just so happened to indicate that the citizens of Mexico were one percentage point higher in terms of incidence of obesity than those of the US. Here is a list of other countries that also came in at a number greater than America’s [still depressing] 31.8%:
Egypt, South Africa, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahamas, Barbados, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Belize, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, and Tonga.
To be fair, most of the articles did clarify their headlines to something along the lines of “fattest major nation” or “fattest nation in the hemisphere”, but generally buried this revelation as an afterthought several paragraphs down. Perhaps a better use of time and words would have been to examine the source behind the epidemic rates of obesity found in Arabic states and Oceanic island nations, or to comment on the fact that the least expensive foods in industrialized nations, those most readily available to the impoverished, are also the most detrimental to maintaining healthy eating habits, but hey, when you can shamelessly use misleading headlines in order to boost the number of clicks on your article, you have no other choice.
The other main issue in these articles with which with I take exception is that these obesity figures – numbers that, to be very clear, were not at all the point of the original report – are based not on disease prevalence or other objective consequences, but on the very flawed calculation of Body Mass Index (BMI). I don’t want to spend too much time on my soapbox, so consider this: Maurice Jones-Drew, consistently named amongst the best undersized players in the National Football League, is well over the obesity threshold of BMI. An incredibly muscular, incredibly healthy professional athlete is one of the 31.8% of Americans that are considered to be obese. BMI completely ignores any other aspect of a person’s lifestyle that contributes to the more subjectively measured quality of one’s health. It’s a mathematical formula created over 150 years ago that purely measures how thick any given person is, and nothing else. It doesn’t factor in what makes up that thickness (i.e., muscle vs. fat), the eating habits of the subject, or, most importantly, the activity level of the person in question. So in other words, in the category of obesity, Mexico has been crowned #1 in the world, surpassing the United States, by an inaccurate assertion based on a flawed statistic that was in no way the focal point of a study.
Doesn’t that seem a little bit infantile?
Better question: does anyone bother to care?
First is the worst, second is the best.