Posted Jan 15, 2012
— With the Mediterranean diet having gained a reputation as the healthiest in the world, it would naturally follow that its home countries would bask in their culinary traditions.
Instead, most of the region, including Lebanon, has seen a steady increase in obesity over the years. Fast Food combined with the automobile lifestyle has meant that over the past couple of decades, most adults could be considered overweight. If Lebanese keep up with their unhealthy diets and lifestyles, they could become among the most obese in the region.
In the United States, childhood obesity, a condition that often leads to diabetes and heart disease, has doubled in the past 30 years, reaching 19 percent, and in Lebanon it has doubled in 10 years (between 1990 and 2000), reaching 13 percent.
“We can think of Lebanon as heading toward that,” says Nahla Hwalla, who has been studying obesity her entire Professional life, starting at St. Luke’s hospital in New York and now at the American University of Beirut, where she will soon release the latest findings of her study.
The findings, based on a survey of children between 6 and 19 years old, might be surprising for Lebanon, long renowned for its healthy cuisine and educated population.
The study found that 19.5 percent of Lebanese boys aged 6 to 9 are obese as of 2009, up from 11.3 percent in 1997. While nearly 15 percent of adolescent boys in Lebanon aged 10 to 19 are obese, up from 9.7 percent in 1997.
Girls tended to fare a bit better, but still saw a marked increase in their rates of obesity over 12 years. Nearly 13 percent of girls between the ages of six and nine were obese as of 2009, up from around 10 percent in 1997.
“Some sort of action needs to be taken,” Hwalla says.
The most important time to do this, she says, is during adolescence, when young adults are developing their eating and exercise habits, which the researcher notes are difficult to change later in life.
Hwalla proudly notes that AUB’s cafeteria now offers healthy food, such as fruit, vegetables and juice, but acknowledges that many students are still far from leading healthy lifestyles, often taking the elevator instead of the stairs or taking the bus service between the upper and lower campus, when they could easily walk.
Observers point to a combination of factors for why Lebanese have gotten into these bad habits, including longer working hours with less time to prepare home cooked food; socioeconomic factors such as increased levels of poverty in rural areas and a Spike in the price of food in recent years; and a desire to imitate the West, not appreciating their own much healthier eating habits.
“More and more people, especially young people, are switching to a diet that’s high in simple carbohydrates and fat,” says Annia Ciezadlo, who noticed this trend while researching her memoir and recipe book on culinary traditions of the Middle East, “Day of Honey.”
She has found three factors for this trend: urbanization, with very few people in Beirut having easy access to freshly grown food; status, with many falsely believing that white bread is better than their traditional brown bread; and globalization, with cheap imports such as white rice having become more accessible than their traditional and much healthier brown grains, such as bulgur wheat or freekeh.
Ironically, grains and vegetables, traditional food of the poor, have been abandoned by the lower classes for heartier dishes, while the wealthier and educated are now increasingly eating fresh vegetables, with poor people being the most prone to obesity.
Ciezadlo adds that “this kind of dietary devolution isn’t just happening in the Middle East. It’s happening all over the world. There’s even a word for it: globesity.”
Malek Batal, professor of nutrition at University of Ottawa, who is currently conducting research in partnership with AUB, also blames Lebanon’s obesity problem on a number of factors, but stops short of blaming individuals for their own habits.
“Nutritionists and dietitians often put the onus on the individual, accusing him of making the wrong food and physical activity choices and thus causing the weight increase. This is unfair,” he says. “We respond to our environment and make the food choices that are possible and sensible from a taste, economic, convenience, social acceptability, status point of view.”
In cities, he notes that walking and bicycling are inconvenient and sometimes dangerous due to heavy traffic, while in both rural and urban areas the opportunity for physical activity is scarce, with almost everyone driving to reach their destinations.
“The combination of these factors make making the right choices extremely difficult regardless of the degree of nutrition education people might have,” says Batal. “It is important to have a systems approach and work in a participatory way with consumers to understand how the food choices are made.”
Although it is difficult to reverse this nationwide trend toward unhealthy food, some people, including academics and restauranteurs, have been working to bring Lebanese back to their traditional and much healthier eating habits. Among the advocates are AUB, which promotes healthy eating on campus, as well as “slow food,” an anti-Fast Food movement that started in Italy in the 1980s.
A handful of local restaurants have begun promoting Lebanon’s rural traditions and a farmers’ market runs every Tuesday in Hamra. But most of this food is relatively expensive, while obesity primarily affects Lebanon’s rural poor.
Still, Hwalla notes that eating healthy doesn’t necessarily have to cost extra. She suggests that people take the stairs instead of elevators and eat an apple instead of a candy bar for a snack.
It’s not just a matter of personal health, she says.
“Eventually, it’s the government that pays for the health care.”
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©2011 The Daily Star (Beirut, Lebanon)
Visit The Daily Star (Beirut, Lebanon) at www.dailystar.com.lb/
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Tags: Carbohydrate, Children, Diabetes, Food, Gain, Heart, Information, Itching, Snack, Weight
