Goa is growing fatter and this is not good news for the State. According to the National Family Health Survey 4 for the year 2015-16 about 33.5 per cent of women and 32.6 per cent of men in the State are overweight. These figures are far above the national average of 20.7 percent and 18.6 percent for women and men respectively. To know how fast Goa is growing fat one has go back to the NFHS survey conducted in 2005-06 when 12.6 per cent of the women and 9.3 per cent of men were overweight. Statistics show that the number of over-weight people in the State has nearly trebled in the last decade. These numbers alone tell us that the general health of the State is sinking quite rapidly and while this is good news for the medical fraternity, corporate hospitals and medical insurance companies which will make a killing as more and more people turn unhealthy due to their eating habits, citizens need to do a rethink.
The question that no one is asking is what has changed in the last decade to make more Goans overweight? As a State we are certainly ahead of the national average, but far behind most developed nations. To give you a rough idea more than two-thirds of the populations in USA, Australia and Saudi Arabia are overweight and at least half of these are obese. In Europe, France, Italy, Romania and Sweden are better off, while the rest are hurtling towards being totally overweight. At the rate at which Goa is going, we might pick up with the rest of the fat world in another decade or so.
This is not rocket science. The problem is that we are eating more calories than we need. The culprits here are fat, which is tasty, sugar which is even more tasty and salt which complements everything we eat. These three ingredients are found in large quantities in fast food and as eating out becomes more frequent, people are going to become fatter. Only those with the will power to exercise and burn the extra calories will beat the trend, the rest will simply hurtle down the slippery slope to obesity.
A study named, ‘The Evolution of Obesity’ by Michael Power and Jay Schulkin says that human genes are hard-wired in favour of fat and sugar. The human species evolved in the savannahs of Africa which were plain and dry. For hundreds of thousands of years the aim was to survive famines and droughts and this led humans to search of sugar and fat which was packed with calories and energy. We have moved from famines to candy stores in a few centuries, not enough time for genes to adapt. So we can blame it on our genes and die early or do something now to beat the general trend of going from being fit to obese in the next ten years.
