ppersad@eng.uwi.tt

Food, health and travel cost

Many husbands and sons breathed a smiling sigh of back relief when it was announced by airlines that the allowable weight per piece of check-in luggage was reduced from 72 to 50 pounds.

Lugging 70 pounds of luggage into and out of vehicles, up the stairs, I tell you, is one manly task that men dread. Especially on the onward journey to the northern climes when the compulsory frozen dalpuris, curry mango, chataigne talkari and chalta not only traumatise the lower back but also refrigerate the trousers during the toting process.

And as if this is not enough trouble, you have to again tempt hernia by being required to place it on the table for the compulsory security search. Of course during that process, amid the rustling of plastic bags and the dispersion of turmeric particles into the immediate environs, you need to give assurances that the caraille is only just that.

Needless to say that having had all the careful packing undone you have to repack and, yes, lug the greatly anticipated baggaged local cuisine to the check-in counter.

The new weight stipulation, of course, cannot by liked by the expert, shopping-competent Caribbean women.

No clear reasons were given for this move but some time ago it was indicated by a North American travel spokesman that the average weight of passengers has made a significant movement towards the right on the scale. Naturally then it takes more energy and hence fuel to get the plane off the ground. Something had to give.

So much for the influence of skinny models!

But honing in on the increasing body mass, it is certainly noticeable that even here, at home, significantly more people seem to have achieved significant lateral growth and that the trend is certainly a blossoming one.

One also notices the explosion in the number of restaurants and their high patronisation rates. Of course there is absolutely no intention to suggest or insinuate that this is a bad thing. There is demand for such a service.

The question that must be addressed however is this: is it really necessary to have such large servings? As a person just outside of the recommended body-mass-index range and trying desperately to stay there, I have been unable, to date, to do full justice to the generous portions that are placed before me. That is unless I want to test the elasticity limits of my stomach and the compression tolerances of my heart and lungs.

It is well known that starting to eat more is like stepping on a slippery slope. You tend to want to eat more. When this process is initiated at a young age, naturally the definition of what constitutes a normal-size meal makes a quantum leap from one generation to the next. What was previously thought to be large or too much now becomes all right and normal.

One just has to look at the size of the popcorn servings at the cinemas in North America. It was a shock and awe experience. The quantity giving rise to the shock, the awe from the fact that young kids were absorbing it in one digestive stride.

The practice is now also becoming normal here. Have you noticed that the word small is slowly but surely being banished from the food courts? No longer are the old categories of small, medium and large omnipresent. Now we have tall and grande!

A parallel trend taking place is the ever increasing young age at which diabetes occurs. In the past, diabetes was thought of as an older person’s disease, one that would strike in the late forties and upwards when people assumed a more sedentary lifestyle. Now the onset age has jumped downwards by many rungs and indeed it is not unusual these days to hear that even children are so stricken.

One would be tempted, and rightly so, to assume that the present diet is not suitable to present lifestyles and that the quantity and type of food being offered at public eating places aggravate the situation.

It should be remembered that not too long ago, T&T was a plantation-based economy and hence the energy requirements (energy from the food in this situation) were different from those required for office-based jobs that predominate now.

Of course sitting in the traffic one, two, three and four hours has a magnifying effect on the weight-gaining process. Before long, obesity might also become an epidemic here. This has serious implications for the cost of private and public health plans and productivity.

Good sense would require that we start acting now if we are to limit or reverse the obesity problem. Since a solution cannot be arrived at through legislative means, a sustained programme of public education must be embarked upon. The focus should be on lifestyle changes.

Dieting has proved to be a temporary, and expensive, option. People must be educated about the negatives of fast foods. It is only pressure from the population that will cause these public food establishments to reform their practices.

Furthermore, provision of more recreation facilities and the promotion of a culture of sports and physical activities would certainly help in the battle of the bulge.

Too much of anything is not good. Lord Krishna, in the Bhagawat Gita, propounds the practice and principle of moderation. Its practice brings about all that’s good, including health.

* Prof Prakash Persad is chairman of Swaha Inc