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obesity

London – food & drugs

Mystery revellers at Westminster

Gorgeous springtime weather here in the UK, which has earned it after a sodden couple of months. Last weekend it hit 17c on Sunday which brought all the picnickers out in force. Primrose Hill was littered with everyone and his dog, and the market at Camden Lock was seething. It’s not the market that was during my day, but I was pleased to see a few things have endured, like Marine Ices and Belgo Noord. But the market itself – once a jumble of knick-knacks, housewares, jewelery, and oddities with a bit of food – has become one big street food extravaganza with little else on offer. If you’re hungry and willing to eat and run, it’s the place to be on a weekend. But otherwise, other markets.

Camden Regents Canal

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve managed to arrive in time to attend some of the free lectures on offer at Kings College London in its Feed Your Mind series. I went to the well-attended first session, Obese London, to learn about obesity rates and their consequences for Londoners. These are highest among immigrant populations, whose diet plummets away from traditional foods into heavy consumption of the worst foods (chips, sugary drinks, chocolate, sweets and processed foods) the longer they’ve been in the country. And of course these deliver obesity and its associated chronic illnesses including diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and higher mortality.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I headed to KCL’s Guy’s Campus, in the shadow of the Shard, and arrived as the Tuesday farmers market was underway. The afternoon’s entertainment was called Hot & Spicy Drugs, which focused somewhat disappointingly and pretty much exclusively on capsaicin (the heat in chilli peppers) and its possible uses in pharmacology. I’d been hoping for a bit more talk about more of the hot & spicy foods and their uses both traditional and pharmacological, but I learned some interesting things. Birds lack the receptor protein that gives chillies their heat; drugs that block this receptor in humans have been developed but are not used since they also block our ability to feel external heat, which seems a pretty undesirable side effect. Applied topically, capsaicin (after an introductory period of discomfort) has a desensitizing effect which can help a lot of kinds of neuralgia and neuropathy. Capsaicin creams and patches have been found to be helpful in relieving pain associated with arthritis, shingles, psoriasis and a number of other conditions. And we got to do a taste test with randomly assigned chocolates with different amounts of chilli in them; as might have been expected, the perception of heat varied wildly among tasters.

Tomorrow I’m off to hear the creator of meat from stem cells, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University, extoll the virtues of stemburgers. Yum.

A larger world

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s class was about pediatric nutrition, and inevitably, we entered into discussions about obesity: how malnourished mothers give birth to the same problems in their babies as did those in the Dutch Famine Birth Cohort Study. That malnourishment nowadays is, of course, not necessarily tied to a lack of food, but to a lack of nutrients, which produces babies with impaired cognitive, functional and immune systems. The children are likely, like those in the Dutch study, to struggle with a life-long legacy of neural tube defects, schizophrenia, infertility, cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory dysfunctions, and obesity. And the issues persist into subsequent generations: their own children are likely to have shorter lives than normal.

Now that obesity rates have reached 1 billion in the developing world, it was timely to come upon Way Beyond Weight, a Brazilian documentary looking at obesity in children. Thanks to globalization of junk food, the story was much the same in Brazil as it would have been anywhere in the long-industrialized world.

The lives of these lonely overweight youngsters are already blighted by illnesses they are not old enough to understand or manage. The grim little titles that identify the conditions of the children interviewed – diabetes, thrombosis, arthritis and high cholesterol – hang in the memory as we witness their food choices: sodas, chocolate, chips, juice and cookies. One child confesses how often she fails to test her blood sugar and inject herself with insulin; another has a full-blown tantrum until his worn parents hand over the package of chips he’s after. Most are unable to identify common vegetables, but are experts in naming brands of junk food and directing their parents’ “food” buying patterns. McDonald’s and Nestle take a bow, showing the damage they can inflict through promotional toys and floating junk food supermarkets respectively.

Sugar content of infant formula Farinha Lactea
Sugar content of infant formula Farinha Lactea

The proud, loving and anguished parents are as bewildered as their offspring: they wean their babies early and switch to high-sugar infant formula, misread nutrition labels, and stare stupefied at the amount of sugar and fat their children’s favourite snacks contain. The health officer and tribal chief of one indigenous village explains how to prepare the instant noodles which he soberly opines are a healthy food. There are other wry moments too: the biologist who took a bite from a cupcake some school children were snacking on and who shows that it has not rotted or grown mouldy in the year and a half since; the school cook who admits that the only part of the meals she actually cooks is rice or noodles: the rest comes from cans.

Many experts lend their voices to the film; some Brazilian, others familiar to North American food watchers: Jamie Oliver and Ann Cooper both figure. In the end, the most optimistic observation, by advertising whiz Alex Bogusky, is that our consumer dollar is the only thing that can cause change. To the mothers who observed that their local store does not even stock fruits or vegetables, that will not seem like much of a solution.