Snack attack: how the west exported unhealthy eating to Africa and Asia
A sweet, butter-filled bread roll, neatly wrapped in plastic, has become the snack rickshaw rider Jewel Ahmed reaches for when he needs to eat while stuck in traffic in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka.
Bun roti, as the rolls are known, are sold for 10 Bangladesh taka (7p) at the same stalls where the city’s rickshaw riders buy heavily sweetened tea to ward off hunger and tiredness.
“I often eat two or three of these a day with some tea. I still feel hungry sometimes but these usually keep me going for a few hours,” says Ahmed, 27, opening a packet and taking a large bite.
Bangladesh is not the only developing country where snacks are ever more prominent in diets, helping fuel busy workers through the day or children on journeys to and from school, and sometimes even replacing meals. For experts, the rise of unhealthy snack foods is concerning because of potential impacts on long-term health, especially non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart conditions.
Ahmed used to eat a far more nutritious diet of fish and vegetables, but rising salinity in the rivers around his coastal home town of Bhola ended his livelihood in fishing and forced him into the city.
“Food in Dhaka is expensive and, with the cost of living crisis, even basic items are now unaffordable,” says Ahmed, who chooses the bun roti over traditional, more substantial snacks such as vegetable-filled shingara pastries. “Because bun roti comes packaged, it stays fresh, and can be eaten easily – especially when my rickshaw is stuck in a traffic jam.”
But snacks like bun rotis tend to offer empty calories without key nutrients. Ahmed, who often eats only one meal a day, has lost weight in the year since he moved to Dhaka. “That’s because these foods give them a quick burst of carbohydrates, but it runs right through them and they need another one,” says nutritionist Barry Popkin, who has observed similar trends in other developing countries as they become more urbanised and industrialised.
Even in rural areas, says Popkin, the move from family farming to industrial agriculture has taken people away from their homes and made them more reliant on quick, often prepackaged and highly processed energy fixes. This has combined with a global spread of snacking, which he says was rare before the 20th century, and increasingly means foods high in sugar and salt.
According to snack manufacturer Mondelez’s 2022 State of Snacking report, 55% of people surveyed around the world eat a meal at least once a week consisting of snack foods – rising to almost two-thirds in Asia.
“That’s a phenomenon that industry sold to us once they started creating ready-to-eat foods and really advertising and pushing it – in the 70s in the US, in the UK a couple years later, and then in Europe,” says Popkin. “It became the norm for adolescents and young adults to eat on the run, snacking at the factory or in the office. This is amazingly common globally now.”
Sales of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) doubled between 2006 and 2019 in developing countries, which food companies have targeted after saturating the market in richer countries such as the US, where 57% of dietary intake is from UPFs.
Popkin, who specialises in research on UPFs, says this has led to a rise in non-communicable diseases globally, especially because of high consumption by children.
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