Thailand's Expanding Waistline. South East Asia's western diet
Thailand's Expanding Waistline
Each year in Thailand over 20,000 adults die from being overweight. Most alarmingly, obesity is now the leading cause of death amongst females here.
I first came to Thailand ten years ago. Back then, in 2005, ten million Thais were classed as obese. Fast forward a decade and I’m back in Bangkok, as the countries bulging waistline continues to expand. Far from it being a case of merely loosening the belt a notch, the growing trend is much more serious.
Thailand ranks second behind Malaysia in the top five Asia-Pacific nations with the highest number of obese people, and the problem isn’t going away. According to Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, this year will see the country struggle with a whopping 21 million members of a "fat tummy network”.
As Thailand’s love of junk food grows, so it seems does its collective waistline. Sugar filled convenience snacks, brightly coloured soda pop and the rapid expansion of junk food outlets such as KFC, Pizza Hut and McDonalds have been enthusiastically embraced in Thailand. Sticky, sugar rich pastries fly off the shelves of 7-Eleven, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and their Thai competitor, Est, are cheap, widely consumed and loaded with sugars. Every shopping mall in town has bakeries, cupcake shops and candy stacked as far as the eye can see. Asia is paying the price for an influence of Western living on a culture that was never designed to eat and drink this way.
My overriding memory from backpacking through Thailand in my early twenties, was the incredible smell of fresh, Asian food. The already crazy busy city centre streets dotted with vendors, seemingly appearing from nowhere to hurriedly set up their super efficient, mobile kitchens on the uneven pavements of Bangkok, catering for morning commuters, daytime snackers and evening tourists alike. These pop up takeouts offer everything from pad thai (traditional noodles) and chicken satay sticks, to fresh fruit served in clear plastic carriers with a small wooden skewer. Far from the perception that offering snacks in this manner by the side of a road is unhealthy, it’s actually some of the freshest, tastiest, best cooked food I’ve ever eaten. The street chefs ability to make such a simple combination of rice noodles and veg taste so amazing, using the most basic of kitchens, is pure artistry. The flavours are truly different to anything you’d order at even the most upmarket Thai restaurant in Europe. It’s lighter and fresher, the taste is more delicate and it hasn’t got that over thickened, creamy, sugared consistency that seems to please the somewhat desensitised Western palate.
The Thai style of meal plans is also quite different from ours, here they enjoy multiple social and relaxed mealtimes throughout the day, often including several snacks or eating at irregular times. This simple, fresh approach to food consumption, perfectly suits the lifestyle. The weather’s hot, the meals are quick and light, it makes for a healthy regime.
Interesting then that this seemingly well preserved concept of clean living isn’t reflected in the statistics; According to Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, 32.2% of its citizens are overweight. I must admit, I’m surprised to see so many young, chubby teenagers wandering around the Bangkok shopping malls. As I’d remembered it a decade ago, the thai girls were slim, they took pride in their appearance. Their tiny waistlines matched their build and delicate features and now, just 10 years on, they look so different.
Unlike the West, fast food here is generally no cheaper nor any more convenient than traditional, local fare, yet junk food has fast become the preferred choice of the next generation. The marketing worked. Kids in Thailand no longer consider it cool to drink fresh water from a coconut or to use wooden sticks to eat rice wrapped in a banana leaf. They prefer instead to drink fluorescent coloured, sugar laden sodas from plastic bottles and to eat greasy, processed, fast food wrapped in colourful foil. Everything it seems has got to be sweetened. They even offer little sachets of sugar with each bag of fresh fruit, just in case your naturally sweet pineapple isn’t sweet enough. Thailand’s growing love of high sugar foods and a teenage rebellion against traditional meals, is reflected in the statistics. The country has seen obesity growth rates of 36% in preschool-aged children and 15% in school-aged children.
There’s no doubt about it, those fast food marketeers have done a terrific job. The people here are surrounded by all this amazing, inexpensive, fresh cuisine, dishes we’d pay a fortune for at a restaurant back home. Yet many consider western junk their preferred luxury. In 2012, WHO suggested soft drinks were a major contributor to obesity in Thailand. The country contributes 1% of the beverage empire's sales worldwide and is among its top twenty sources of revenue in country terms. Soft drinks sales totalled 30 billion baht in Thailand last year.
US convenience store chain 7-Eleven with over 7800 franchised outlets in Thailand, the country is third behind America and Japan
If you’ve never set foot inside the Thai version of this Texas born, green and orange chain store, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped inside a children's play shop, the food looks disconcertingly fake. Sugary, prepackaged bread buns, filled with lime green custard are individually wrapped in little air filled plastic pockets. The shelves are lined with sweets, chocolate and processed snacks. There’s an obvious emphasis on quick and convenient. Along the wall each fridge is stacked floor to ceiling with fluorescent coloured, sugar rich energy drinks. In the chiller section the bleached white sandwiches barely resemble bread and you’d struggle to distinguish the bright pink ham and gloopy yellow cheese filling from the plastic wrapper. On the counter top, bright orange hotdogs, the kind you might find tinned in the UK, spin endlessly as they cook over a mini conveyer belt. This isn’t real food, yet the locals love it. Commuters dash in en route to work to pick up super sweet iced coffees, parents pull up with their kids on scooters to buy after school snacks. You can purchase plane tickets and pay your electric bills in store, convenience in every sense.
There’s no doubt about it, the 7-eleven has cleverly integrated itself into Thai life and it isn’t going anywhere. It’s a franchise that’s expanding as rapidly as Thailand’s waistline, with 500 new stores popping up each year and a colossal marketing budget that sees round the clock commercials on it’s own cable TV channel featuring cutesy cartoon characters named ‘sausage’ and ‘soda’. Thailand’s health advocates aren’t just up against the candy kings and soda giants, in addition they’re battling the mammoth corporations responsible for flogging this stuff.
It’s depressing to witness freshly cooked rice and pak choi, steamed with garlic, ginger and the warm liquorice flavour of holy basil shunned by the locals. Served with smiles in the sunshine at a quirky little street side cafe which reuses empty plastic bottles to create lampshades, Bangkok shoppers opt instead to squeeze themselves into a glass enclosed, air-conditioned food mall, surrounded by the depressing corporate familiarity of mass market logos.
The food markets in Thailand are something else. The beautiful, vibrant greens of fresh herbs stacked high alongside bright yellows and reds of mango, jackfruit and fresh pineapple. It’s yet somehow fast food marketing has persuaded the next generation to ditch it in favour of factory produced, chemical filled, sugar laden rubbish.
While the rise in obesity within the UK continues, there’s a definite shift in thinking. Consumers are starting to make the connection between stuffing our faces with processed, chemical filled junk and a rise in sickness throughout the population feeling lethargic, sick and depressed on a daily basis. We’re slowly waking up to the fact the model family portrait, sold to us through television, of dad treating the kids to a bucket of deep fried chicken to give mum a break from cooking, doesn’t equal health or happiness. We were conned. Like a drug dealer cleverly reeling us in with promises of instant gratification, for far too long we turned a blind eye to what we put in, focusing only on the feeling, the end result. We’ve become a nation hooked on chemicals and sugar designed to fulfil our emotional needs. Once they had us addicted that was it. The dealers simply continued to feed the craving. I feel like screaming at Asia to wake up to the lies before its too late.
There’s no doubt about it, the link between the influx of Western junk food and the Asian obesity crisis is real. Thailand is catching us up. We’ve created a monster. With a big, yellow, capital M.
