RHON­DOR DOWLAT

Se­nior Re­porter

rhon­dor.dowlat@guardian.co.tt

The in­tro­duc­tion of tax­a­tion on sug­ar-sweet­ened bev­er­ages (SS­Bs) and ul­tra-processed foods is be­ing rec­om­mend­ed by the Di­a­betes As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (DATT), as a mea­sure to dis­cour­age the con­sump­tion of un­healthy foods and bev­er­ages.

How­ev­er, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says no such pol­i­cy will be con­sid­ered, de­spite the fact that he has is­sues with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of un­healthy foods be­ing of­fered to cit­i­zens by mega com­pa­nies.

The Di­a­betes As­so­ci­a­tion made the rec­om­men­da­tion in a re­lease yes­ter­day, not­ing it is well known that fast food com­pa­nies con­tin­ue to in­fil­trate the na­tion’s schools through spon­sor­ships of sports teams, schol­ar­ships and oth­er school-re­lat­ed ac­tiv­i­ties.

“This must be stopped to pro­tect our chil­dren from the al­lure of un­healthy food choic­es,” the re­lease stat­ed.

The as­so­ci­a­tion ap­plaud­ed Deyals­ingh’s call for ac­tion on un­healthy lifestyles and out­lined ev­i­dence-based strate­gies for re­duc­ing con­sump­tion of ul­tra-processed and sug­ary foods.

How­ev­er, in an im­me­di­ate re­sponse, Deyals­ingh out­right­ly said no such pol­i­cy will be con­sid­ered. He al­so made it clear he had not start­ed a war with fast food out­lets.

“We can’t be eat­ing fast foods two times a day, sev­en days a week, four weeks a month. That’s what I said, and you can’t be drink­ing Coke and Pep­si every day. It is not a war. It is sim­ply to start to do things in mod­er­a­tion.”

The DATT com­mend­ed Deyals­ingh for his bold state­ments at the U Health Ex­po­si­tion at the Hy­att Re­gency on Mon­day, where he high­light­ed the crit­i­cal is­sue of the na­tion’s ad­dic­tion to high-sug­ar drinks and fat­ty foods.

Deyals­ingh had slammed mega food chains and cau­tioned the pub­lic against con­sum­ing their prod­ucts, not­ing that hav­ing to care for cit­i­zens who fall ill with non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases (NCDs) was putting a strain on the health sys­tem.

“His recog­ni­tion of the role in­ter­na­tion­al fast food brands play in feed­ing this ad­dic­tion un­der­scores a grow­ing con­cern that de­mands im­me­di­ate ac­tion. The min­is­ter’s nam­ing of these pop­u­lar brands for the first time de­serves high praise,” the DATT said.

In re­sponse to the min­is­ter’s call for col­lab­o­ra­tion to com­bat the un­healthy lifestyles, the DATT reaf­firmed its com­mit­ment to sup­port the Gov­ern­ment.

“Our ded­i­ca­tion to this cause is root­ed in the alarm­ing rise in di­a­betes and oth­er NCDs, which are sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­pact­ed by di­etary choic­es,” it added.

The DATT not­ed that in 2023, the or­gan­i­sa­tion con­duct­ed a “Junk Food Sur­vey” as part of its on­go­ing ef­forts to un­der­stand and mit­i­gate the con­sump­tion of un­healthy foods among the pop­u­la­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly young peo­ple.

The re­sults high­light­ed a press­ing need for con­cert­ed ac­tion to ad­dress the na­tion’s health cri­sis.

It said the com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey en­gaged 954 young in­di­vid­u­als across T&T, cov­er­ing a wide age range from 11 to 35 years.

The find­ings re­veal a sig­nif­i­cant in­cli­na­tion to­wards fast food con­sump­tion among the youth, with a stag­ger­ing 88.4 per cent ad­mit­ting to eat­ing fast food at least once a week. Alarm­ing­ly, more than one-third of these re­spon­dents re­port­ed con­sum­ing fast food more than three times per week, it said.

The sur­vey al­so shed light on di­etary habits con­cern­ing fruit and veg­etable in­take.

“De­spite uni­ver­sal­ly ac­cept­ed rec­om­men­da­tions sug­gest­ing the con­sump­tion of four to five serv­ings of fruits and veg­eta­bles dai­ly, the sur­vey re­sults were far from meet­ing these guide­lines. On­ly 23 per cent of re­spon­dents met the tar­get for veg­etable in­take, and a mere 13 per cent did for fruit,” the DATT said the sur­vey found.

“Fur­ther­more, about half of the par­tic­i­pants failed to in­clude a fruit or veg­etable in their di­et on more than one day of a typ­i­cal week, high­light­ing a sig­nif­i­cant gap in nu­tri­tion­al ad­her­ence.”

It al­so dis­closed, “Fast food pref­er­ences among Trinidad and To­ba­go’s youth were dom­i­nat­ed by well-known chains, with the pop­u­lar­i­ty rank­ings as fol­lows: KFC (88 per cent), dou­bles (78 per cent), Chi­nese (72 per cent), Sub­way (68 per cent), Church’s (65 per cent), Roy­al Cas­tle (63 per cent), Piz­za Hut (61 per cent), BBQ (59 per cent), and gy­ros/burg­ers (54 per cent).”

It al­so quot­ed the Amer­i­can Heart As­so­ci­a­tion’s rec­om­men­da­tion that “women and chil­dren should not con­sume more than six tea­spoons (24 grammes) of added sug­ar per day and men more than nine tea­spoons per day (36 grammes)”.

How­ev­er, based on the nu­tri­tion facts pan­el of most pop­u­lar sug­ar-sweet­ened bev­er­ages, “the ma­jor­i­ty con­tains ten to 16 tea­spoons of added sug­ar or more, more than the en­tire dai­ly rec­om­men­da­tion is just one bot­tle”.

The DATT sur­vey showed that the most pop­u­lar soft drink, one in three, in T&T were the co­las or “black soft drinks”, with more than 75 per cent of young peo­ple con­sum­ing soft drinks at least twice in a typ­i­cal week.

“In­ter­est­ing­ly, the sur­vey delved in­to the rea­sons be­hind the pref­er­ence for fast food, with taste and con­ve­nience emerg­ing as the pri­ma­ry fac­tors. Most re­spon­dents per­ceived the price of fast food to be com­pa­ra­ble to health­i­er food op­tions, sug­gest­ing that cost is not a de­ter­rent. In­stead, the ap­peal­ing taste and the con­ve­nience of fast food were the main at­trac­tions dri­ving their con­sump­tion pat­terns,” the DATT said.

These find­ings, the as­so­ci­a­tion said, paint­ed a con­cern­ing pic­ture of di­etary trends among the youth in T&T to­wards un­healthy ul­tra-processed foods.

 Draw­ing on the suc­cess­ful strate­gies dis­cussed at the Healthy Caribbean Coali­tion (HCC) meet­ing in Ju­ly 2023, the DATT ad­vo­cat­ed for a com­pre­hen­sive ap­proach to re­mov­ing ul­tra-processed prod­ucts from schools and com­mu­ni­ties.

These strate­gies in­clude: front-of-pack­age warn­ing la­bels; im­ple­ment­ing black oc­tag­o­nal warn­ing la­bels to in­form con­sumers about prod­ucts high in sug­ars, fats, and sodi­um etc; reg­u­la­tions to ban tar­get­ed ad­ver­tis­ing of ul­tra-processed foods to chil­dren; pro­hibit­ing ad­ver­tise­ments, spon­sor­ships, and pro­mo­tions of un­healthy foods in schools, me­dia, and events; tax­a­tion of sug­ar-sweet­ened bev­er­ages (SS­Bs) and ul­tra-processed foods, and in­tro­duc­ing tax­es to dis­cour­age the con­sump­tion of un­healthy foods and bev­er­ages.

The DATT al­so em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of in­creas­ing ac­cess to and avail­abil­i­ty of healthy foods.

“By en­hanc­ing the in­fra­struc­ture and poli­cies that sup­port the pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and mar­ket­ing of fruits, veg­eta­bles, and oth­er nu­tri­tious foods, we can cre­ate an en­vi­ron­ment that en­cour­ages and fa­cil­i­tates health­i­er eat­ing habits,” the DATT said.