Thank you, Thank you very much. Then President Bill Clinton stepped up to a podium to make an announcement. I believe we have might a decision now that will permit us to create an economic order in the world that will promote more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace. That clip is from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, and in it, the President signs into law the North American Free Trade Agreement,
or NAFTA. The goal of that law was to boost the U s economy by opening up trade with Canada and Mexico. Twenty four years later, trade has grown. For example, Mexico now sends almost eleven billion dollars worth of fruit and vegetables each year into the US, and farmers in states like Iowa make their living by sending korn south. But NAFTA also caused something else to expand, a different
kind of boom. Clinton didn't mention back in After more than two decades of America exporting corn, cork, and dairy products to Mexico, what's also growing our Mexican waistlines. Welcome to benchmark. I'm Scott Landman, economics editor of Bloomberg News in Washington on Benchmark. We've discussed before how the Trump administration thinks NAFTA is unfair to American workers, but we've never really looked at how the trade agreement has changed
Mexico and its citizens. One big change America has made Mexico more opies. A recent study by researchers in the US and Europe, posted on the website fox Eu, found a direct correlation between declining public health in Mexico and the increase in soybean and pork products being shipped there. Shelley Hagen, our economy team intern in DC, wrote an article about this study, and she's here with us today. Shelly, Welcome to Benchmark. Thanks for having me, Scott. So what
did this paper say, Shelly? A group of economists found that Mexico has been importing a large amount of unhealthy American food and beverage products, a number that has grown since NAFTA went into effect in the ninety nineties. At the same time, Mexico's imports of healthy American products like fruits and veggies have not grown nearly as fast as the unhealthy imports. Well, Mexico has been purchasing more and more unhealthy goods from America. Mexico's obesity rates have also
risen as much as fifteen in twenty years. In fact, Mexico now has more overweight and obese people as a share of the population than more than thirty major economies, including the US. All right, thanks Shelly. Now to discuss this change in public health, we're joined by Simone Barkara. He's the executive director of the Nutrition and Health Research Center at Mexico's National Institute of Public Health, and he's spent years studying obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. He joins
us from Cuernavaca, Mexico, just outside Mexico City. Dr Barkarra, Bien beneito, and welcome to Benchmark. Thank you very much. First, just a bit of full disclosure. Dr Barkerra's research has been partially funded through an unrestricted grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which encompasses the charitable activities of Mike Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, which is the parent company of this podcast. So let's go back in time
thirty years ago to the nineteen eighties. Dr Barkerra, what did Mexicans eat back then at that time, the consumption was mostly of basic foods that were prepared in houses, mostly beings, tortilla, and many vegetables that are combined in the dishes. Also fruits that are locally produced, and different types of water infusions that we called our fascus, some of them with some amount of sugar, but not as much as a soda. And that has changed a lot
since then. And how would you describe the general health of Mexicans thirty years ago. Well, in the eighties there was a very low prevalence of overweight and obesity, maybe only about less than thirty percent of the population had obviosity all overweight, and right now is seventy percent. So we basically are thinking of another country where where over city was very uncommon. And how did this change throughout
the nineteen nineties and the two thousand's. Well, it was very interesting to see that in just an eleven year periods from night to nineteen nine, the increase, for example, in so that consumption was of about four percent. At the same time at that moment, the consumption of fruits and vegetables decrease, and there was a very important change in the patterns of food consumption but also in the general food system in the country. How much of a
problem is obesity in Mexico today? Today, I can say that is the most important public health problem. We have an alert and epiemiologic alert due to the side rates of diabetes and obesity that we are facing. Since maybe since two thousand and twelve, we have sevent of all adults with overweight and obesity and one out of every three children has overweight or obesity. So it's a very
complex situation. In the case of diabetes, we are one of the countries in the world with the highest mortality and bordering of this condition, which is mostly related to the high rates of ovicity. And what would you say are the byproducts of this trend? I mean, how is that affecting, say, health services in the country, hospitals, doctors.
How would you describe that well? Is very complicated. Is a challenge because obesity is associated with more than faulting causes of death, and so it goes from diabetes to the vascular disease and cancer. And these chronic conditions are very expensive because they cannot be solved with antibiotic with a single treatment. These conditions require life treatments and complications are very expensive and cause a lot of incapacity. So
these these conditions affect productivity. So, for example, the diabetes is the main cause of blindness in the country, also also of amputations, and also of renal failure and dialysis, and this kind of treat meants are so expensive that there is no enough budget in the system to to be able to treat all the patients with this problem. So so definitely the only option is to try to walk very fat on preventing and controlling these conditions through
reducing the rates of obesity. Why do you think Mexicans have become more obese than many other countries that are more developed and have higher incomes. Well, I think it's a combination of factors, but one of the most important is a very rapid transition to a model of industrialized food, which is a phenomenon called accorporation, and without controlling the
new environment. So the population transition very quickly from drinking aguas frisk ass and and traditional food basic food prepar at home to ultra processful that is bought in a supermarket that has a lot of ingredients that our own healthy such as sugar, salt, and fat, and without knowing really the relation of diet to these chronic conditions which
were not really prevalent in the country. So you can still now see many populations in impoor areas of the country, such as the South, where people have diabetes for the first time in their families. So first generation and is very complicated. They don't understand why they felt thirsty, and they sometimes they don't know that that they have to stop drinking soda. There are many communities where soda has
become part of local ritual traditions. So it is becoming very complicated to try to implement measures or policies to decrease this unhalth new habits in the population. And would you say that obesity is more of an issue in cities or in rural areas or both. Well, obviosity is more prevalent in the cities right now in Mexico, But when you mentioned the speed of increase, rural areas are now having a higher speed of increasing the prevalence of obesity.
That means that rural areas are very quickly catching up with the high prevalence of obbicity that we are watching in the cities. Simon, over the last twenty years or So did it ever cross your mind that it was NAFTA that was helped playing a role in delivering these kinds of foods that were boosting obesity in Mexico. Yes, yes, because we saw very interesting effect effects in food prices
after NaSTA. For example, Mexico is a big publisher of sugar, but with NAFTA we started to have also high cone fructose competing in the market. That and and the high fructose is subsidized empowered by the United States, so it's really low priced. So to try to maintain the production and the workers of sugar, the government in Mexico also
started some sort of support and subsidies to sugar. So the net balance of nat time in this example was that in a very short period of time we had very inexpensive sugar, and that was an incentive for producers of many kinds of ultra process foods of adding sugar, which everybody likes, and it's an inexpensive way to make to add something to a food. So this was one of the very important changes. The other change that was impressive was the amount of supermarkets in Mexico just after NATA.
I could say that most of the football chases now are done in supermarkets sometimes are the big change with the same names as in the US. And there used to be shopping in most people. Would you used to shop at, say, smaller markets. Is that is that fair? Yes? Yes, they used to shop in small markets of locally produced foods for example, that there was always as the bakeries in Europe, we have the tortillas the cornery shop in which there was a tortilla small little factor in in
in every town. And now the tortillas are in solved in the supermarket also and it's the same the same kind of preparation of flower for for all of them, and it's an industrialized process. So is the food system has changed a lot in only twenty two third years now. There have also been some efforts to attack this problem, to restrict the consumption of the kinds of foods that are making people a beast. There's a soda tax and and also I believe a junk food tax. Are these
taxes working? Have they had any effect on obesity? Yes? We we definitely have evidence that these taxes are working. And when we first watch consumption of soada in the end of the nineties, there was a very big amount of calories coming every day from sugary beverage in all age groups. So so it was it was a problem, and we started recommending a solar tax seems two and three.
So after more than dangers, finally the government had a window of opportunity to implement the tax, and we sad don't different efforts to evaluate the effects in these two years which is the period that we have the tax. It's a small tax, it's only one the super leader, so equivalent to about ten and even though if smaller than that what most international agencies recommend, it has been able to show reductions in consumption that are of about
seven to twelve depending on the on the groups. And that's a lot that in a country that has one and twenty six million inhabitants, having these kind of reductions to cap it them represent many tons of sugar that are not consumed thanks to this policy. Besides taxes, what other policies could help. Well, we are trying very intensively to promote some warning levels on food products that are unhealthy, particularly so that and ultra process foods that are hiring salt,
sugar or fat. We have seen that countries like Chili that implemented. These kind of warning levels in the foods allow the consumers to very quickly identify on healthy foods and look for healthier decisions. So I think this is one policy that in which we need to work very hard. We are trying to to convince the decision makers that this is a very powerful tool in a population that doesn't know how to interpret these complex labelings with numbers
and percentages. That it's almost like a cigarette warning labels for chunk food right exactly, you're saying this product is high or has an excess of sugar, and then the consumer can compare this one with one that doesn't have this level, and and that that is very helpful in the context. And the other policy that cool health a lot is controls on marketing. So again in the same way as in tobacco, market think is a very powerful
tool of corporations to increase consumption. And sometimes this marketing in foods is directed to children. So we need to develop better policies and regulations to protect children from having on healthy foods. We are for example, evaluating point of purchase and in the supermarkets it is completely directed to attract children's and most of the foods that are sold have have excess of sugar and other ingredients that are unhealthy.
So this is something that which we also need to work a lot, and in schools and other sites in which children are very frequently, such as public parks, try to increase availability of water and to decrease marketing and
also sale off on healthy products. Dr bark Hera, we can't let you go without talking about the big issue, loving all over this and trace Manuel Lopez over Doors the leading candidate in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, and he likes to talk about how NAFTA has driven Mexican farmers out of business, just as a side not check out our new poll tracker on Bloomberg dot com for the
Mexican presidential election. Dr Barca, is there any link between the loss of local agriculture in Mexico and the rise in obesity? My sense is that in general, many of the macro egonomic indicators of Mexico have been improving. Even talking about health and development, we have been a nation that is showing a little bit about average improvement compared to other Latin American countries. So it is complex to evaluate something such as the food system that has many effects.
Many experts, for examples from the World Health Organization are trying to understand the net benefits of trade, which some times are for example, food availability and reduction of on their nutrition, and then compare the trade offs such as increasing no communical point diseases. This is a challenge and we don't have very clear understanding of it, but in general I think the main challenge is a challenge that can be solved mostly by regulating and helping the food
environment more than avoiding phrase just as a solution. All right, a very diplomatic answer, Dr Barkerra, thank you so much for joining us today on Benchmark. Thank you very much. Scott Benchmark will be back next week. Until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, our Bloomberg app, and podcast destinations such as Apple, podcast, Overcast and Stitcher. Please take time to rate and review the show, and you can also find us on Twitter.
You can follow me at Scott Landman Show le You're at at Shelley k Hagen s h E l l y k h A g A. N our guest is at at s b A r q U E r A and as a side note, check out our new pull tracker on bloomberg dot com for the Mexican presidential election. Benchmark is produced by tofor foreheas the head of Bloomberg Podcast is Francesco Levy. Thanks for listening, See you next time.