Oldways (the non profit of which I wrote in a previous post) is dedicated to replacing the highly caloric, low nutrient dense foods that are plentiful in the Western Diet — think fast food, soft drinks, and margarine — with whole foods that are abundant in traditional diets—think whole grains, vegetables, and olive oil. This shift is a noble goal, but unfortunately the contrary is occurring on a global scale. The western diet is moving into developing nations and the traditional diets are on their way out. This scary phenomenon even has a name: the nutrition transition.
The nutrition transition is a term explaining the changes in diet, physical activity, and health that occur when a poor country begins to prosper. The adoption of a westernized lifestyle seems like a glorious prospect in the thick of poverty, but these changes including decreased activity, sedentary lifestyles, and increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, vegetable oils, and animal products promote weight gain. In The World is Fat, Barry M. Popkin writes that “for most developing nations, obesity has emerged as a more serious health threat than hunger.” As junk food stocked grocery stores take the place of farmers markets people consume more calorie dense food than they did before, leading to obesity. In China, for example, the percentage of obese adults more than doubled between 1991 and 2004 (Popkin). And obesity doesn’t arrive without baggage. As the United States knows all too well, diabetes, heart disease, and other obesity related illnesses are life threatening. Cardiovascular disease alone is responsible for a quarter of the deaths in America and has remained the leading cause of death for decades. As obesity shows up in the developing world, these problems do too.
Traditional diets and lifestyles promote healthy people and the nutrition transition makes this clear in the most devastating of ways.
