LIFESTYLE DISEASES

The Minister of Health, John Rahael, has warned that fast food rewards and treats were not the healthy way to raise children. He should also have mentioned a surfeit of pastries, candy and ice cream. Based on global statistics provided by the minister at Tuesday’s launch of the Health Ministry’s Health Promotion Month that 22 million children worldwide under the age of five  including more than 17 million in developing countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, were obese and overweight, the situation should be viewed with concern.

The obesity is fuelled yet further when parents give their school aged children money  to buy  food that is not exactly healthy. The resulting lifestyle diseases place a tremendous burden on the country’s health system through the provision of medication and hospital services, not to mention the suffering of those who are ill because of the food they eat. Nonetheless, it is a situation that cannot only be contained, but reversed, should parents both inculcate healthy lifestyles and insist on these lifestyles for their children from infancy. For it is the parents who determine or rather should be able to determine what their children eat.

A contributory factor is that many women are now employed outside the home and alternate arrangements have had to be made with respect to regular meals. Simpler ways have had to be found and unfortunately good old fashioned home cooked food has for many been largely replaced by fast foods which can be “picked up” on the way home from work or school. Several decades ago the leading causes of death were tuberculosis, influenza, pneum onia and typhoid, a situation aggravated by poverty and malnutrition, while many of today’s major health problems, for example, hypertension, cardiac failure, certain cancers and organ failure are products of current lifestyles. Unless we take warning  there is the potential for the situation to become worse.

But while the “wonder drugs” of penicillin, izoniazid, aureomycin and terromycin, developed during the period 1941 and 1955, had been able to contain tuberculosis, influenza, typhoid and pneumonia, along with measles, diptheria and typhoid and sexually transmitted diseases, once they were taken as prescribed, some of today’s problems have been self-induced, however unwittingly, and continue to receive an assist from individuals, who should be concerned.

The Health Minister, quoting from a 1993 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development Report, declared that it had been estimated that for every dollar spent on a child’s health, seven dollars were returned through reduced spending on social welfare and increased productivity by both youngsters and adults. Rahael reasoned that parents, leading by example, should encourage their children in regular physical activities and through good nutrition as well. Being fat, rather than an indication of being well fed, instead, initially may be a sign of incipient health problems, which if not addressed early through a sustained proper diet, accompanied by a regimen of exercise, may become later a cost to the individual, his/her employer and to the State.