"Talking bout food...ah feel dat is here dat we really lorse we way, because everyday Tantie hearing bout a seta younger and younger Trinis getting sick wid what used to be ole people diseases–colon problems, all kinda cancer in all kinda strange places. Is like we eh eating enough ah de bhagie and ochroe and ting. Is all dat fast-fried "cardboard" and de rest of food dat processed to within an inch of its life we does be shovelling in dat causing dese problems, oui.
We need to get weself back to the habits dat made we grandparents reach a ripe ole age with never a trip by de doctor. Is de blue food and rest of provision wid stew saltfish, baigani and tomato choka wid sada dat responsible fuh making we forebears live long and healty. But yuh know how stubborn Trini could be, and how we does be so easily influenced by de North American styling....I ent know when we go learn!"– Reproduced with permission, from the Trindiary May 29, 2001
Take a walk around the Savannah this Sunday afternoon or just browse any big mall and count the number of overweight children and people you see. You'll be surprised. I used to boast that Trinidadians were lean, fit and healthy. Not any more.Some weeks ago the psychologist with the West Indies cricket team, in his letter of resignation, noted that he had been unable to make the West Indian cricketers change their diet. Mr Hoad was quoted as saying that the players "eat too much fried foods and as everyone knows, fried food is not good for you, it makes you weak."
No surprises here. Fast food is bad for athletes, bad for you and especially bad for children. This has been known for years in the US. All sorts of attempts have been made to curb the influence of the fast food companies, to little avail.The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries a week. About half of the adult population visits a restaurant on any given day and more than half of the restaurant industry's annual revenue now comes from fast food. In 2000, Americans spent more than US$110 billion on fast food, more than they spent on new cars (US$101 billion); higher education (US$75 billion); records, tapes and CDs (US$12 billion) and movies (US$7 billion).
Childhood overweight has tripled in the US in the past 30 years, with one in four children overweight or at risk for overweight. This has been directly related to eating fast food, which is exorbitantly high in fats, saturated fats, calories, and salt. The typical hamburger has 260 calories with nine grammes of fat, of which four grammes is saturated. It also has half a gramme of salt. A large french fries gives you 450 calories with 44 grammes of fat (22 unsaturated) and one third of a gramme of salt. Not much salt here.
That's why you see so many people adding salt to their fries as if their life depended on it. In a way it does. A piece of fried chicken breast, done the original way, has a staggering 400 calories hidden away inside its succulent meat. Two hundred and twenty calories (55 per cent) come from fat. It also has over a gramme of salt.A hot fudge sundae, my favourite, pumps 340 calories into you each time you order it.
By comparison, an eight-year-old needs about 1,700 calories a day of which 30 per cent or around 600 calories should come from fat and under ten per cent total calories from saturated fatty acids. The recommended intake of salt ranges from two to four grammes a day and some experts feel that a half gramme a day is biologically sufficient. Children in T&T today consume diets that are substantially higher in dietary fat and salt than these recommended levels and if this continues we will be seeing more and more obese children and the corresponding diseases associated with poor diets: firstly diabetes, then high blood pressure, then heart attacks and strokes as the children get older.We must stop this outbreak of fast-food-related illness.
I first wrote most of this almost exactly 12 years ago and, with many others, have daily attempted to put it into practice in my office, with little success. So it is with a sickening sense of failure that I see that the directors of the NCG Bocas Lit Fest have decided to throw away the idea of social responsibility and, for the second year running, team up with the good folks at Kentucky Fried Chicken to produce the KFC Children's Bocas Lit Fest. Feed the brain but fatten the body.It is discouraging to have to criticise an event which has so many positives, but it cannot be correct to take money from a fast-food company which encourages children to eat poorly, yet claim you are concerned about T&T. As I said last week, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
