Financial Times has an article up about rising rates of ‘lifestyle disease’ in the developing world:
The infectious diseases that have traditionally killed the world’s poor are starting to recede. Instead, people in Africa, India and China are beginning to die of the same things that kill westerners: chiefly, obesity- and smoking-related diseases. This change is known as the “epidemiological transition”. How it plays out over the next few years will determine whether people in poor countries can for the first time expect to live into old age or whether they will simply start dying of different things.
Obesity is no longer a reserve of the west…
On a shopping street in Kampala or Johannesburg or Hyderabad today, you will find people as fat as those you’d see in a midwestern American mall. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago. But now, many formerly poor people can afford to gorge on calories, often in new fast-food restaurants. Many now drive instead of walk and spend hours watching television or sitting behind computer screens.
For many of these people, obesity may not yet carry the stigma that it does in rich countries. Indeed, they may view it favourably. Devina, a clinical officer in Nakuru, Kenya, announced to one of us that she had decided to become very fat. Why? “Because I think it looks nice.” In 2000, for the first time, there were more overweight than underweight people in the world.
Just wait til body images pathologies and the diet business get their hands on billions of overweight Asian people…
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This makes me want to watch Wall-E again.
I’m starting to think we’re not too far from the day when we’ll need a robot to teach us what it means to be human…
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