T E X T
As growth slows in wealthy countries,
Western food companies are aggressively expanding
in developing nations, contributing to obesity and
health problems.
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 farthestflung
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.
Nestlé’s direct-sales army in Brazil is part of
a broader transformation of the food system that is
delivering Western-style processed food and sugary
drinks to the most isolated pockets of Latin America,
Africa and Asia. As their growth slows in the wealthiest
countries, multinational food companies like Nestlé,
PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively
expanding their presence in developing nations,
unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending
traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.
A New York Times examination of corporate
records, epidemiological studies and government
reports — as well as interviews with scores of
nutritionists and health experts around the world —
reveals a sea change in the way food is produced,
distributed and advertised across much of the globe.
The shift, many public health experts say, is
contributing to a new epidemic of diabetes and heart
disease, chronic illnesses that are fed by soaring rates
of obesity in places that struggled with hunger and
malnutrition just a generation ago.
The new reality is captured by a single, stark
fact: Across the world, more people are now obese
than underweight. At the same time, scientists say,
the growing availability of high-calorie, nutrient-poor
foods is generating a new type of malnutrition, one in
which a growing number of people are both
overweight and undernourished.
“The prevailing story is that this is the best
of all possible worlds — cheap food, widely available.
If you don’t think about it too hard, it makes sense,”
said Anthony Winson, who studies the political
economics of nutrition at the University of Guelph in
Ontario. A closer look, however, reveals a much
different story, he said. “To put it in stark terms: The
diet is killing us.”
Even critics of processed food acknowledge
that there are multiple factors in the rise of obesity,
including genetics, urbanization, growing incomes and
more sedentary lives. Nestlé executives say their
products have helped alleviate hunger, provided
crucial nutrients, and that the company has squeezed
salt, fat and sugar from thousands of items to make
them healthier. But Sean Westcott, head of food
research and development at Nestlé, conceded
obesity has been an unexpected side effect of making
inexpensive processed food more widely available.
“We didn’t expect what the impact would
be,” he said.
Part of the problem, he added, is a natural
tendency for people to overeat as they can afford
more food. Nestlé, he said, strives to educate
consumers about proper portion size and to make and
market foods that balance “pleasure and nutrition.”
There are now more than 700 million obese
people worldwide, 108 million of them children,
according to research published recently in The New
England Journal of Medicine. The prevalence of
obesity has doubled in 73 countries since 1980,
contributing to four million premature deaths, the
study found.
By ANDREW JACOBS and MATT RICHTEL
The New York Times SEPT. 16, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com
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