An astounding report from ABC news shows how the western diet has led 95% of one Pacific island nation’s population to become overweight.
The island of Nauru is in the South Pacific, 400 miles away from the nearest civilization and with a population of nearly 10,000 people. According to the ABC news report, the people of Nauru were not too long ago “fit and lean” hunter-gatherers who grew their own food and primarily consumed raw or boiled fish.
This was before the 1980s, when the discovery of phosphate resources generated enough wealth to rapidly develop their island. With their new found wealth they started importing processed, fatty food from the West.
Their diet changed, and so did their health. Now 1/2 of Nauru’s adult population have type-2 diabetes, the highest prevalence of the disease on the planet. In addition, their life expectancy has dropped from 55 to 48 in the “last five or six years,” according to Nauru’s president, Marcus Stephen.
The troubling prediction that type-2 diabetes will afflict 1 in 3 people in the United States by 2050 has already come to pass in Nauru. Watch the video to learn more about the how type-2 diabetes became so prevalent in Nauru, and has even changed its culture. As the author of the report, Nick Watt, put it, “Type-2 diabetes, a preventable disease, is spreading across the world with the spread of convenience foods, and it’s crippling Nauru.”
Posted by Rishi Sidhu.
