NAFTA is making Mexico sick

[Judi Lynn]

NAFTA is making Mexico sick
Fri Jul 26, 2013 at 07:54 AM PDT.
by VL Baker.

NAFTA is making Mexico sick. Literally. Since the implementation of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994 and the influx of unhealthy processed food, sugary drinks, and raw soy and corn imports—the latter two products used to make highly processed foods and feed livestock—Mexico has had a spike in lifestyle diseases including diabetes, heart disease and obesity and has surpassed the United States as the most obese nation in the world.

In Civil Eats, Judy Bankman writes about the nutritional transition that Mexico has made from a healthy natural foods diet to a "western style" diet of high protein, high sugar and highly processed food.

On a visit to southern Mexico in 2008, I was shocked to see Coca-Cola billboards dotting rural highways, and roadside tiendas selling bottles of Coke along with local produce. Mexico consumes more gallons of sugary beverages per year than any other country. It’s certainly not coincidental that 9 million people in Mexico are suffering from diabetes.

Mexicans also just surpassed the U.S. as the most obese nation in the world, with an astonishing prevalence rate of 32.8 percent. Mortality rates due to heart attack, diabetes, and high blood pressure have increased significantly along with the spike in obesity rates. The main driver of these troubling health concerns is the energy-dense, nutrient-poor “Western” diet, which has already changed the food landscape in Mexico, pervading areas both urban and rural.

More:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/26/1226585/-NAFTA-is-making-Mexico-sick?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29#

[Benton D Struckcheon]

1. Just chatted with my wife re this,

she agrees totally. Back in the old days, the closer you got to the border, the more stuff like McDonald's you'd run into, she says. These days, they'd be everywhere because of NAFTA.

[Demeter]

2. Frankly, it's not doing the US any good, either.

[a la izquierda]

3. I'll never forget the day I landed in Guadalajara...

and as I drove to my host house, we passed every fast food place familiar to me as an American.

And then we passed the Walmart and I about screamed.

NAFTA took away the right of Mexican farmers to do what they'd done for like 8000 years. Farm corn and support their families.

[Judi Lynn]

4. That's REALLY sad to hear, a la izquierda. Horrible.

All those people thrown out of their centuries old trade as farmers, working on their own family land are being undercut by US taxpayers-subsidized corn, rice, ect. in their own countries, the very food which sustained the Mexican peoples thousands of years, suddenly coming back to Mexico in stripped down, far cheaper form, making the hard work they do themselves obsolete, and unsalable.

Monstrous.

Then the same creeps who arrange the government subsidies of agriculture here loudly bitch and whine when the agricultural workers who no longer can find work in their own countries show up ready and anxious to work in the U.S., as if they are trying to steal from them.

We know who's stealing from whom, but we're the ones without the power to "influence" people to our points of views.