Child Obesity: No Food Culture is Safe

According to recent news, France also now presents a high rate of child obesity. This has probably not surprised French people, but has certainly challenged the Anglo-Saxon idea that the French, and the Mediterraneans in general, eat healthy and light food, while the British and the American diets are richer in fats and sugar. This is probably true, but it is equally evident that for the last fifteen or twenty years the two approaches to food have become closer to each other.

In fact, Anglo-Saxon food is still fattier, saltier and sweeter, and richer in additives, colours and preservatives. But today processed and preserved foods are also massively sold in countries such as France, Greece and Italy, usually associated with an uniforming Mediterranean diet. Actually, a unique Mediterranean diet does not exist, as what people eat in France differs greatly from what the Greeks or Italians do. Paradoxically, these three diets are more similar today, thanks to the global food coming from big retailers, than in the past, when these three peoples used to eat more traditional food.

The common traits of the Mediterranean diet (the abundance of vegetables and fish, a balanced consumption of meat and sweets, the frequent usage of olive oil, etc.) guaranteed lower rates of obesity for years. Today this difference is fading, and Mediterranean countries are also affected by continuously growing rates of obesity and child obesity, although less than Anglo-Saxon and North European countries.

The news is bad, but it also has good potentialities. The fact that we have all the same problem, and that no one may state a supposedly greater attention to health, means that it's time to do something all together. France is following England in taxing junk food. Perhaps, this may provide some good results, but it also has the weakness of only targeting the poor. Other measures may offer a less classist approach and perhaps better results. For example, labelling products by also visually highlighting the risky ingredients could be a good idea. In the past, some countries have experimented with traffic lights, geometric shapes, colours and other strategies to visualise the unhealthiness of a product.

In the meantime, it should be enough to fix bad policies that worsened in the recent past. For example, in Italy, Britain and other countries, the products packaged by the supermarkets such as bread and meat don't have to show their ingredients on their labels. Customers must look for 'the book of the ingredients', usually on the other side of a big supermarket or lost somewhere; otherwise, they cannot know whether the bread they want contains lard or the meat they are buying is added to with nitrite. Regulating on such a thing would be a first signal demonstrating interest in contrasting unhealthy food.