Saturday 30th of March 2024

a hairy brazilian...

 

food groups

FORTALEZA, Brazil — Children’s squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

Celene da Silva, 29, is one of thousands of door-to-door vendors for Nestlé, helping the world’s largest packaged food conglomerate expand its reach into a quarter-million households in Brazil’s farthest-flung corners.

As she dropped off variety packs of Chandelle pudding, Kit-Kats and Mucilon infant cereal, there was something striking about her customers: Many were visibly overweight, even small children.

She gestured to a home along her route and shook her head, recalling how its patriarch, a morbidly obese man, died the previous week. “He ate a piece of cake and died in his sleep,” she said.

Mrs. da Silva, who herself weighs more than 200 pounds, recently discovered that she had high blood pressure, a condition she acknowledges is probably tied to her weakness for fried chicken and the Coca-Cola she drinks with every meal, breakfast included.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil-obesity-nestle.html

 

food groups...

The four major food groups — Coca-Cola, KFC, Macdonald's, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway, Donut King, KafeKream and Pepsi — may be healthy in moderation but they end up blowing up people when abused or consumed all at once. We all know that despite having 320 millions counted heads in the US, they all eat the four food groups as if Yamerika was populated by 473 millions. The food-addiction merchants recognised that on this planet there were many other poor people who did not benefit from the healthy food groups and looked a bit... say, normal. Advertising beyond saturation has helped these "normal" poor people to become healthier on the four food groups... 

 

Meanwhile:

It's the famine that not enough people have heard about.

An estimated 20 million people in four countries — Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen — are at risk of famine and starvation. And the word isn't getting out, says Justin Forsyth, a deputy executive director of UNICEF.

Speaking with NPR's Audie Cornish on All Things Considered, he explained that politics and donor fatigue are two of the main causes.

"Politicians around the world are very focused domestically on politics at home, not on international issues," Forsyth says. "In addition, some of the public fear that their aid money hasn't really made a difference when they've provided it before."

read more:

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/07/18/537907401/why-its-so...

 

Here we should see an opportunity for the four food (international) groups. Instead of the government sending food to these poor people, why not pay the four food groups to go and install some outlets where people are starving. Soon, the thin sudanese would look like the fat Brazilians. What could be better than that?

tax on the four food groups...

A 20 per cent tax on sugary drinks is being proposed by Australia's leading health organisations as part of a tough new strategy to tackle obesity, which they now say poses a greater risk to the nation than smoking.

A coalition of 34 high-profile groups including the Obesity Policy Coalition, Cancer Council, Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne and the Stroke Foundation are calling on the federal government to establish obesity prevention as a national priority.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/hospitals-and-health-groups-demand...

malcolm abbott: we have 'nuf taxes...

 

Malcolm Turnbull rejects calls for sugar tax to tackle obesity

Prime minister says ‘we have enough taxes’ and health authorities should focus on promoting healthy lifestyles

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/19/malcolm-turnbull-...

 

Hypocrite Malcolm tells us that health "authorities" should do more to promote "health" when HE IS IN CHARGE OF HEALTH AUTHORITIES AND his party did everything to scuttle the star system for food. see:

 

fionaville and the food website...

 

 

obesity in colombia...

 

The episode, which Dr. Cerón reported to federal investigators, was reminiscent of the intimidation often used against those who challenged the drug cartels that once dominated Colombia. But the narcotics trade was not the target of Dr. Cerón and her colleagues. Their work had upset a different multibillion-dollar industry: the makers of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages.


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Their organization, Educar Consumidores, was the most visible proponent of a proposed 20 percent tax on sugary drinks that was heading for a vote that month in Colombia’s Legislature. The group had raised money, rallied allies to the cause and produced a provocative television ad that warned consumers how sugar-laden beverages can lead to obesity and diet-related illnesses like diabetes.

The backlash was fierce. A Colombian government agency, responding to a complaint by the nation’s leading soda company that called the ad misleading, ordered it off the air. Then the agency went further: It prohibited Dr. Cerón and her colleagues from publicly discussing the health risks of sugar, under penalty of a $250,000 fine.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/health/colombia-soda-tax-obesity.html

 

a chilean chill...

SANTIAGO, Chile — They killed Tony the Tiger. They did away with Cheetos’ Chester Cheetah. They banned Kinder Surprise, the chocolate eggs with a hidden toy.

The Chilean government, facing skyrocketing rates of obesity, is waging war on unhealthy foods with a phalanx of marketing restrictions, mandatory packaging redesigns and labeling rules aimed at transforming the eating habits of 18 million people.

Nutrition experts say the measures are the world’s most ambitious attempt to remake a country’s food culture, and could be a model for how to turn the tide on a global obesity epidemic that researchers say contributes to four million premature deaths a year.

“It’s hard to overstate how significant Chile’s actions are — or how hard it has been to get there in the face of the usual pressures,” said Stephen Simpson, director of the Charles Perkins Centre, an organization of scholars focused on nutrition and obesity science and policy. The multibillion dollar food and soda industries have exerted those pressures to successfully stave off regulation in many other countries.

Since the food law was enacted two years ago, it has forced multinational behemoths like Kellogg to remove iconic cartoon characters from sugary cereal boxes and banned the sale of candy like Kinder Surprise that use trinkets to lure young consumers. The law prohibits the sale of junk food like ice cream, chocolate and potato chips in Chilean schools and proscribes such products from being advertised during television programs or on websites aimed at young audiences.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/health/obesity-chile-sugar-regulations.html?

starving obese kids in india...

Today, the US-led West, clings to a moribund form of capitalism and has used various mechanisms in the face of economic stagnation and massive inequalities: the raiding of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, financial speculation and increased militarism.

Under the guise of globalisation, we also see an unrelenting drive to plunder what capital regards as ‘untapped markets’ in other areas of the globe. International agri-capital has been moving in on Indian food and agriculture for some time. But as an agrarian-based country underpinned by smallholder agriculture, it first needs to displace the current model before bringing India’s food and agriculture sector under its control.

Devinder Sharma describes the situation:

India is on fast track to bring agriculture under corporate control… Amending the existing laws on land acquisition, water resources, seed, fertilizer, pesticides and food processing, the government is in overdrive to usher in contract farming and encourage organized retail. This is exactly as per the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as the international financial institutes.”

In return for up to £90 billion in loans, in the 90s India was instructed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies and run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange. According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. To push through the programme, hundreds of millions are to be shifted out of agriculture.

Successive Indian administrations have been quite obliging. While India’s current government talks about ‘make in India’ (self-sufficiency), the reality is subservience to western capital. Agriculture is deliberately being made economically non-viable for small-scale farmers: financial distress and ‘economic liberalisation’ have resulted in between 300,000 and 400,000 farmer suicides since 1997 with millions more experiencing economic distress and over 6,000 leaving the sector each day. This lies at the root of the ongoing agrarian crisis. But it goes much further. We are witnessing not only the structural transformation of India’s rural base but an all-encompassing strategy designed to incorporate India into the US’s corporate-financial-intel architecture.

Whether it involves the displacement of indigenous food and agriculture by a model dominated by western conglomerates or it is the selling of pharmaceuticals and the expansion of private hospitals to address the health impacts of the modern junk food system (in India, the healthcare sector is projected to grow by 16% a year), either way, it’s a lose-lose situation for the population.

But it all forms part of the holy grail of neoliberalism, GDP growth. A notion based on an economic system defined by bad food and ill health, joblessness, mass surveillance, spiralling inequalities, environmental degradation, militarism and debt on one hand; on the other, by bail outs, tax havens, massive profits and subsidies for large corporations and banks.

So, what can be done? Whether we are discussing India or elsewhere, the scaling up  of agroecology based on the notion of food sovereignty offers an alternative. Much has been written on agroecology as a model of agriculture but also as a movement for political change. Part of the process involves resisting the dismantling of rural economies and indigenous agriculture and instituting a sustainable food system rooted in local communities, whereby producing for local and regional needs takes precedence over supplying distant markets.

It also entails rejecting the agenda of the WTO which subjugates local agriculture to the needs of global markets (determined by agribusiness interests). And, unlike the current system, it includes supporting healthy and culturally appropriate food, encouraging diversified food production and recognising that food is not simply another commodity to be traded or speculated on for profit.

 

Read all:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/08/01/india-mortgaged-forced-fed-illness-a...

 

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When I was in Africa in the 1960s, "agroecology" did not exist as a word. But my instructions (recommendations) to the locals was to strongly resist the "new" easy food, most of which was free as "charitably" supplied by USAID (or its equivalent in those days). "Grow your local food, look after your cattle" was my motto, in countries where joining the public service was the dream of most "educated" people. The major problem was that although the said countries were keen to have an oversupply of beancounters and pen pushers, this only led to massive public debt (borrowings) and a certain form of laziness (not much to do — the work, mostly fabricating fake birth certificates, could have been done by one person instead of ten), while running out of local food supplies, then supplemented by imports that had been designed to "change" the diet of mostly healthy people into fat slaves of the US fad-foods. I had some success though, but not enough. Wars and conflicts were then instigated by the West (CIA) to impoverish the people further.

truth in advertising?...

One of Coca-Cola's marketing slogans in New Zealand did not go over well, turning into a humorous and embarrassing blunder for the company.

The beverage firm ran a vending machine signage that read "Kia ora, mate." The slogan was an attempt to mix a greeting from the island’s indigenous peoples’ language, te reo Maori, with English.

While in English, the word ‘mate’ is commonly used to refer to friends, it has a very different meaning in Maori. The slogan essentially read, "Greetings, death."

Online critics have noted the irony of Coca-Cola’s mistake, with one Twitter user claiming that Coca-Cola may have gained some “self-awareness,” and another one commenting “Finally, truth in advertising.”


Read more:

https://www.rt.com/business/441849-cola-greeting-new-zealand/

 

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truth in research?

“Whenever I see a study suggesting that a single food (such as pork, oats, pears), eating pattern (having breakfast) or product (beef, diet sodas, chocolate) improves health, I look to see who paid for it,” Nestle writes. “If an industry-funded study claims miraculous benefits from the sponsor’s products, think: ‘Advertising.’ ”

One of the most noteworthy research funders is Coca-Cola, which invested more than $6 million in a report called the International Study of Childhood Obesity, Lifestyle and the Environment. It tracked 6,000 children, starting in 2010, looking at their physical activity, sleep, TV habits and diet. Researchers did not look for a correlation between soda and obesity, so they didn’t discover one. Instead they found the most important correlations of obesity were lack of sleep, low physical activity and frequent TV watching. “Coca-Cola could not have asked for a better outcome,” Nestle writes.

The beverage company also funded a group called the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), which offered supposedly expert advice on the obesity epidemic, while emphasizing the importance of physical activity over avoiding sugary drinks. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Coca-Cola had given millions to the GEBN and those associated with it. At the time, Nestle called GEBN a “front group for Coca-Cola” with “a very clear” agenda: “Get these researchers to confuse the science and deflect attention from dietary intake.”

In the wake of the scandal, Coca-Cola adopted a policy of somewhat radical transparency, revealing startling figures. It reported that from 2010 to 2017, it spent $140 million funding research and on partnerships. Some of the partnerships were especially disturbing. The advocacy group Ninjas for Health found that from 2010 to 2015, Coca-Cola contributed $2.9 million to the American Academy of Pediatrics and $3.5 million to the American Academy of Family Physicians. These are organizations “that might otherwise be expected to advise avoidance of sugary drinks,” Nestle writes. She says those specific ties have seemingly been severed but “Coca-Cola still funds an extraordinary number of minority groups [and] pediatric groups. It’s just astonishing.”

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2018/10/27/how-the-food-industry-fooled-us-into-eatin...

 

 

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