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Neoliberal obesity and coronavirus in Mexico
19 Sep 2020
American capital brought high rates of chronic disease to Mexico which has led to a surging COVID-19 death toll.
...Lopez-Gatell is also the government’s coronavirus tsar, and early on highlighted the role of the country’s “epidemic” of diabetes and obesity in exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico has reportedly recorded more than 70,000 COVID-19 related deaths to date – although the actual toll is likely much higher.
In recent years, Mexico has vied with the US for the title of most obese nation on earth – three-fourths of adults there are overweight, and at least one in 10 have diabetes.
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For more bleak news, one need look no further than a recent Washington Post dispatch quoting Barry Popkin, an obesity researcher at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on the effects of coronavirus on the global obesity epidemic:
“Covid is accelerating it. We’re seeing new lines of junk food introduced, see companies giving out free junk food and calling it disaster relief … It’s very stressful, so you go for comfort foods and tasty things. And we expect the recession will take hold and we’re going to hit a food-insecure world where people are buying this food because it’s cheap.”
Call it a vicious neoliberal cycle – one in which life itself is scarily cheap.