Is Free Trade Making People Obese?

Free trade skeptics might have something else to add to their list of complaints against trade deals like NAFTA, at least according to some nutritionists, report Andrew Jacobs and Matt Richtel in the New York Times. Soaring obesity rates in countries including Mexico.

“Mexico began lifting tariffs and allowing more foreign investment in the 1980s, a transition to free trade given an exclamation point in 1994, when Mexico, the United States and Canada enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement. Opponents in Mexico warned that the country would lose its cultural and economic independence,” they write.

“But few critics predicted it would transform the Mexican diet and food ecosystem to increasingly mirror those of the United States. In 1980, 7 percent of Mexicans were obese, a figure that tripled to 20.3 percent by 2016, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Diabetes is now Mexico’s top killer, claiming 80,000 lives a year, the World Health Organization has reported.”

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