The writer is editorial consultant at The Express Tribune, news junkie, bibliophile, cat lover and occasional cyclist
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 3rd, 2013.
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I do not think eating sweet or fatty once in a while is that dangerous.. (and seriously who is out at KFC or Mc'Do every single day?)
What we need to focus on is exercise. Our kids cannot go out to play because it's too dangerous, they stick the TV and to their video games all day long. We seriously need to organize some sport clubs in our cities.
The same goes for teenagers and adult.. eat all the fast-food you want but please take out one hour out of your mobile - laptop - tv serial routine and do some physical exercise!
Thank you for creating this awareness for the people.
If you think South Asians are obese you need to visit America. I have never seen as many grotesquely obese people anywhere. Mind you they have trouble walking but in their hand is a gallon of coke and a kilo of French fries. Yes, the food we eat here is very heavy and rich in calories, our sugar intake is too high and there is a lot of room for improvement in our diets. Eating better and healthier food coupled with regular exercise could save us a lot of money, some time in future. Aerated soft drinks like Coke are literally poison.
A necessary reminder, but isn't lack of exercise the greater evil here? I insist (and I think there is research to support me too) that a diet that accommodates, in moderation, pure ghee, real eggs and the like will result in a healthier person than a partially hydrogenated, artificially sweetened, calorie-counting one.
I too say the BBC documentary and it was quite disturbing but I thought it was based on a very narrow segment of society in the larger cities like Mumbai after all India is some 1.2 billion people............of course that does not mean there is no problem.