Fighting fat

Munching my way through a hearty breakfast with half an eye on the TV and another on one of my cats that had both eyes on my plate — I paused. And then stopped. And then put my plate somewhere that puss could not get at it and concentrated on a deeply depressing programme on BBC World about obesity in India. India is getting very very fat, especially its under-25’s and the programme made a causal link between burgeoning obesity and the rise and rise of fast food outlets. Ring any bells yet, Dear Reader?

Back in the mists of time and in the years when I was getting to know my vast extended family, assorted infants were presented for my admiration. Several of them were remarkably fat — and I commented on their obvious rotundity only to be told they were ‘healthy’. Thus it was that I discovered the reversal of polarities in the perception of what is and is not truly healthy. Around the same time I discovered that this was not just a local problem but a subcontinental one. Clearly, this was one cultural difference that was going to have to be challenged.

The Battle of the Kitchen began in earnest when I moved to live full-time in Bahawalpur in 2003, inheriting a cook who would have fried custard in ghee if she could have found a way to do it. Starting by banning ghee completely from the family diet, a reduction in sugar intake followed and cholesterol-free cooking oil made an appearance. The Kitchen fought back tooth and nail, and it was only the radical step of hurling an oil-slick masquerading as breakfast through an open window, that I really caught and held its attention. Today, healthy eating prevails in the Cork household and if there is any tendency towards backsliding, the breakfast-out-of-window incident is recalled in graphic detail.

Which brings us to fast food. Pakistan has some of the best indigenous fast food I have eaten anywhere in the world and with a little care, the hungry traveller can even ‘eat healthy’ whilst on the move or as an interlude in the retail therapy experience. All very well … but not very ‘modren’ is it? Nor stylish. Nor cool if you are in your teens or early twenties, come from a reasonably affluent family and like to be seen as a part of the weekend blingfest that is made up of your friends from school, college or university.

Fast food outlets, Western style, are popping up like mushrooms in the autumn. They offer a modicum of comfort, a food product the quality of which may vary — and for some, a fast-track to assorted coronary conditions, if not now, then in later life.

One in four people in Pakistan is overweight and the country is galloping towards urbanisation with 50 per cent of us living in cities by 2020. Lifestyles are changing, once active people have increasingly sedentary jobs in urban industries, and a high-energy diet that used to get burned off in physical activity — isn’t. With 22.2 per cent of the population aged 15 or more classed as having crossed the obesity threshold, ‘healthy’ this population is not. We also have the highest percentage of people with diabetes in South Asia and considering the industrial quantities of sugar consumed by the average family that is a situation unlikely to improve in the near future.

Match an increasingly unhealthy population to an underfunded public health service and minimal investment in raising public health awareness in any sector of the population, and it is not difficult to discern yet another crisis on the event-horizon.

The life I lead is sedentary too, mostly spent in front of a computer all day — but I and my family have, over the years, learned to eat well and healthily by modifying local culinary habits. Nowadays, nobody complains. Well, not often and yes, from time to time I treat myself to a particularly scrumptious filled sandwich from an international franchise.

So, have a care the next time you call a fat baby ‘healthy’. You are reinforcing a dangerous misconception and please do try a few less spoonfuls of sugar in your tea. Tootle-pip!

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3^rd, 2013.

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