The Change Mariner: Southern Arizona: Epicenter of Obesity Epidemic

April 19, 2004

Southern Arizona: Epicenter of Obesity Epidemic

Americans are in grave danger of undoing the greatest achievement of medical science - the doubling of the human life span from four decades just a century ago to nearly 80 years today.
The culprits are the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes, with some doctors predicting children could lose as much as 20 years off their lives.

Nowhere is this more likely to happen than in Southern Arizona, where an evolutionary collision has left those native to this land overwhelmed by these twin epidemics, which are maiming and killing them at the highest rates in the world.

Among Southern Arizona's largest Indian tribe, the Tohono O'odham, 50 percent of adults are battling diabetes, a figure that soars to 85 percent in older adults. They are facing a diabetes risk 10 times that of the rest of the country. Mexican-Americans in this region who share Indian blood suffer diabetes at twice the rate of the population as a whole.

The blame lies squarely on a toxic modern diet and lifestyle - cheap, high-fat, sugar-packed, processed, supersized foods, requiring no more energy to get than extending a hand out the car window.

Because this region sits at the center of the problem, experts here have developed new and aggressive ways to attack it, successfully bringing diabetes under control in those most severely sick - and even starting to prevent it in those most at risk.

But poverty is a barrier, here and elsewhere, between many Americans and a healthy life.

"Eating healthy costs a lot."

Put a bag of carrots in one hand and a Happy Meal in the other, and the cost of each is pretty much the same. But in one hand you have a whole meal, and the other you have only the start of one.

Food Fight : The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It
McGraw-Hill

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Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (California Studies in Food and Culture, 3)
University of California Press

Amazon Price: $11.53

Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World
Mariner Books

Amazon Price: $10.40

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Harper Perennial

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