Paying the price for our fast food appetite

IF she gets away with it, I’m on to my lawyer straight away. Ksenia Ovchinnikova, who hails from Siberia, has done what most of us have done: she’s succumbed to temptation whilst on a fast. She’s not given in to a chocolate biscuit, or a sly glass of wine. No, the Russian has been led into temptation by a hamburger. Not just any old hamburger, but a McDonald’s hamburger, and the result has tipped the poor lady over.

She’s now suing McDonald’s over a cheeseburger advert so tempting that she was compelled to break her religious fast over Lent and buy one. Will this open the floodgates to those who just had to pick up a chocolate bar at the checkout? Or can I sue for that ice cream I ate but really didn’t need?

Amusing though it is, Ksenia’s action represents something far more serious. Advertising has a lot to answer for in terms of obesity and junk food and the Government doesn’t seem to be doing much about curtailing it – you never see a sexy ad for fruit or a salad but there are plenty around for crisps, cakes, biscuits. Recently I was offered a ‘Health Bar’ at a promotion in the city. When I read the label, it was shown to contain five teaspoons of sugar. So much food is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Fast food outlets, McDonald’s and others try to tempt us with double/ fried, crispy, supersized – all codes for extra calories. There are usually more fast food outlets in the poorest areas. This won’t help the statistics that the UK has one of the worst records in western Europe for severely obese children. Advertising plays an enormous part in this and it’s criminal when food or chocolate manufacturers try to tempt them in by offering tacky toys, desserts or fizzy drinks. Any high street reveals the epidemic obesity has become – and it hadn’t happened before fast foods and sugary drinks.

And talking of fizzy drinks, CocaCola have a lot to answer for. At Christmas, they often send round Santa sleighs handing out drinks to children, a blatant marketing ploy to youngsters. It’s the tip of the iceberg. Little do people realise how much water this product takes. In Mexico, certain towns are suffering hugely because of the manufacture of what has been called ‘the official soft drink of corporate greed’.

Drinking water is increasingly hard to get in San Cristobal de las Casas, a gorgeous mountain town in southern Mexico. It’s so scarce that some neighbourhoods don’t have running water more than a couple of times a week. So residents drink Coca-Cola, produced by a local bottling plant and almost as cheap as buying extra water from tanker trucks. They’re getting through about half a gallon of Coca-Cola a day – per person.

Mortality rates from diabetes in the region have increased 30% over a three-year period and the disease is now claiming more than 3,000 lives a year. A study from PubMed Central, a highly respected database from the National Institutes of Health attributed 184,000 global deaths each year to the consumption of sugary drinks. And in Mexico and undoubtedly other areas of the world where sugary drinks are consumed a lot, children are becoming diabetic at an early age, rotten teeth are common and a whole lot of other conditions reckoned to be related to the Coke consumption are affecting the community (and of course the rest of the world). So why is there a water shortage?

It’s because the Coca-Cola factory on the edge of town has permits to extract more than 300,000 gallons of water a day – based on a decades-old deal with the federal government. The plant is owned by Femsa, one of Mexico’s most powerful companies. Coca-Cola pays about 10 cents per 260 gallons to the federal, not the local, government – a disproportionately small amount for its water privileges.

In many places there is almost a religious fervour surrounding the drink. Aggressive marketing campaigns by Coke and Pepsi, started in the 1960s, helped embed sugary soft drinks into local religious practices, blending Catholicism with Maya rituals. It’s the same the world over – in the Kalahari, bushmen worship a discarded glass Coke bottle as a gift from the gods. In South America, many pray over bottles of Coke or Pepsi, believing it has superpowers.

So when you pick up a can of fizzy drink be mindful that, for example, every can of Coke or Pepsi contains about 10 teaspoons of sugar – four more than the daily intake recommended by the World Health Organisation. The liver turns the sugar into fat, blood pressure increases and caffeine causes the pupils to dilate and prevents drowsiness.

The research, from British pharmacist Niraj Naik, is scary. CocaCola and other fizzy drinks cause a reaction to parts of the brain that is comparable to the effects of heroin and creates the need to drink more. Coca-Cola refute this. In a press statement, a spokesperson for CocaCola says that the beverage is “perfectly safe to drink and can be enjoyed as part of a balanced diet and lifestyle”.

I wonder if the people of San Cristobal will share that view. Meanwhile, Ksenia Ovchinnikova is taking on McDonald’s. Her claim is for the vast sum of £9.80. But the principles behind it are worth far more.

Any high street reveals the epidemic obesity has become – and it hadn’t happened before fast foods and sugary drinks

> Tempting – but at what cost to health?