July 4 calumny! Hotdogs and hamburgers blamed for making Kuwaitis fat

Is nothing sacred?

By Dan Murphy,?Staff writer / July 4, 2012

People compete in the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest qualifier at Arizona Mills in Tempe, Ariz., on June 9. American fast food is being blamed for making Kuwaitis fat.

Tim Hacker/AP

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A rather astonishing recent story in Bloomberg Businessweek called "Obesity, the other Gulf War syndrome," blames the fact that Kuwait is by some measures now the second fattest nation on the globe on a surprising culprit: The introduction of American fast food to the tiny kingdom after US troops drove out Saddam Hussein's army in 1991. The article is illustrated with a Kuwaiti man and woman snarfing hamburgers being dropped out of an American warplane.

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"According to surgeons like Al Sanea, the bariatric boom can be traced to the buildup to the 1991 Gulf War. That was when hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops descended on the Gulf nation, bringing with them Taco Bell, Hardee?s, Baskin-Robbins, and Nathan?s Famous (NATH) hot dogs, among others," writes Bloomberg's Peter Savodnik. "'The [war] was the demarcation line,? says Dr. Abdulwahab Naser Al-Isa, at the Department of Community Medicine & Behavioral Sciences at Kuwait University. Andrew Smith, the author of the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food, says, ?The American military went in, and obviously they wanted fast food. Therefore, the number of fast-food establishments expanded exponentially.' And Kuwaitis fell in love."

Mr. Savodnik's article, relying as it does on anecdotes rather than research, and a strange confusion of correlation with causation, caught my attention. It's true that Kuwaitis are today, just as most of the residents of the other wealthy Gulf monarchies are, among the fattest people in the world. The ready availability of high-fat food coupled with sedentary lifestyles are the not particularly surprising causes. Too many fast-food burgers? Of course. But also too much kofta, and too much machboos, the national lamb dish served on a bed of rice (the rice cooked in fatty lamb-stock).

And while ice-cream, hot dogs and the other favorites that Americans will be eating at picnics and in backyards around the country today to celebrate July 4 are certainly fattening, the popularity of these foods are no more the cause of obesity here or anywhere else than the heavy use of butter in French cuisine is the reason that only 10 percent of the French are obese (against about 30 percent in the US and about 33 percent in Kuwait).

Food culture, portion size, and a lack of exercise seem to be the most important causes. And across the world, increasing prosperity in previously poor countries is the most clear reason for rising body mass indices.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/vk-n3ocMuJI/July-4-calumny!-Hotdogs-and-hamburgers-blamed-for-making-Kuwaitis-fat

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