Cheap food = fat waistline

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Brazilians are fat. The information was published by a statistical institute associated with
Brazil's Ministry of Planning

That's bad news for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who himself has several pounds to spare. He built his entire political campaign on the promise to end hunger, which apparently afflicted 50 million Brazilians, and now finds that the problem is quite the opposite: A little more than 40 percent of his compatriots display a certain degree of obesity. Barely 4 percent show signs of thinness, but not even these skinny types support the claims of inequality: Most of them owe their figures to metabolic factors. We all have known people who eat voraciously without ever paying the consequences.

Naturally, the news of a national epidemic of cellulitis has an adverse political effect on Lula. To the degree that it increases the ration of calories, his ''Zero Hunger'' plan could be counterproductive to the nation's health. His intention to bring social justice to the poor could end up plugging their arteries with mounds of cholesterol.

It is dangerous to play with food. In the United States, where obesity, allied to diabetes and cardiopathy, kills more people than cancer, obesity seems to be a product of populism and the self-interested labor of lobbyists.

The rational sequence goes like this: There is an evident and proven relationship between the increase in weight among the people and the increase in the size of their food portions. Fifty years ago, less food was served at restaurants and at home, perhaps one half of what is placed on a dish today. Why? Because the cost of food, in relation to people's income, was a lot higher than today.

And here comes the unexpected populist twist: Because grain producers have enough muscle in Congress, year after year they secure juicy subsidies for their crops. This allows them to sell fodder to beef and poultry producers, so the cost of food in the United States is among the lowest in the world. This explains the excessive size of the portions and the people.

The economic paradox is most interesting. If food is cheap, the pocketbook benefits and the waistline suffers. Of course, ''the waistline'' is a metaphor that goes beyond renouncing one's thong. Disease besets the arteries, pancreas, kidneys and heart, which leads to enormous medical expenses that overwhelm the Social Security and Medicare systems. If food is expensive, the opposite occurs. The viscera behave amiably, but we have less income for entertainment, clothing, housing, cars, studies or the comforts of home.

Is there any solution to this trap, or Catch-22, as Americans say? There are two:

• To eliminate the subsidies for food producers so that the distortions and damage that those subventions create may disappear from the market.

• To develop a major information campaign about food, diets and the harmful consequences of ingesting unhealthy food in excessive amounts.

We're dealing here with two complicated battles, however. The politicians with connections to agribusiness will defend their clients tooth and nail, invoking national interests. This happens everywhere, not just in the United States. In Venezuela and Mexico, for instance, the brainless left has invented a sacred cause that it calls ''alimentary sovereignty.'' But it may be even more difficult to teach people to eat adequately.

When Emperor Charles V, the ruler of half the planet in the 16th century, retired to the Monastery of Yuste in western Spain, troubled by frequent bouts of gout, he arranged for barley to be planted in nearby fields so that he could enjoy good beer -- the ideal beverage to fuel the ferocity of those excruciating joint pains.

Something similar happened to a contemporary, King Henry VIII of England. He was fat, gluttonous and sensual, proud of his appetite and his thighs (in those days, men, not women, boasted of their beautiful legs) and also gout-ridden but incapable of renouncing his favorite dish: whale tongue, which is rich in uric acid, precisely the element that triggered his worst pains.

Ever since, not even kings know how to feed themselves. They eat bad food and too much of it

Enero 14, 2005

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