By Richard Tardif
Shame on Coke! Mexico’s rate of diabetes is claiming 80,000 lives a year, and the World Health Organization reports it will get worse before it gets better, if it gets better. It is clear to any reasonable person, that this is a result of a handful of dominate transnational food companies, hogging 96 percent of the market, selling affordable junk food to the poor, mainly composed of Mexico’s Indigenous populations.
According to independent journalist Tamara Pearson, covering Mexican politics and social justice issues, the result is that today, a new 24-hour convenience shop, called Oxxo owned by Coca-Cola, opens roughly every eight hours in Mexico. Her 2018 article, The Coca-Cola Invasion Is Causing Mexico’s Slow Death by Junk Food: Mexico’s traditional diet of beans and corn has been replaced with pizza and hamburgers, Pearson reports that these stores have grown from 300 shops in Mexico in 1990 to nearly 16,000, serving a staggering 10-million people a day. The mega-company reports the severe obesity and Type 2 Diabetes problem in Mexico is a result of local culture and individual choices.
Pearson writes, “They would be wrong,” and makes a startling comparison of the now to the past. For example, the Mexican indigenous food pyramid—known as the “sacred trinity”—revolves around three key foods: corn, beans and chili. This eating pattern is a blend of the broad traditional diets of four major cultures: the Indigenous people (Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, and other Native Americans), the Spanish, Portuguese, and continental Africans.
Mexico is corn, or Nanj jm’e, which means mother provider, a tradition dating back to the domestication of corn around 8,000-12,000 years ago. For Indigenous cultures 
in Mexico, it means history, identity, life, science, culture, and organization. It is a way of life, and a way of coordinating with the land and the Gods. Further, the base of this pyramid begins with family, a sharing of cooking together and eating together as critical to healthy eating. Today, Indigenous communities consume soft drinks, candy and other junk food, and people ask for pizza and hamburgers, and rarely cook at home.
And the fix? The government wants to tax junk food. It’s been shown; Sin taxes, or sugar taxes, do not deter.
In 2015, Christopher Snowdon, in an essay titled, The Ineffectiveness of Food and Soft Drink Taxes reviewed the efficacy and fairness of sin taxes aimed at preventing obesity, and found, even at low levels of taxation, consumers, whether poor or not, don’t change their behaviour appreciably, and when they do abandon the taxed foods, it will often be in favour of other high-calorie choices. Sin taxes are regressive; they hurt the poor disproportionately and, knowingly, does nothing to solve the problem.
Richard Tardif is a personal fitness trainer, author, and an award-winning journalist writing teaching about health and wellness. Richard’s first book Stop the Denial: A Case for Embracing the Truth about Fitness, challenges, surprises, and inspires you to embrace a fitness lifestyle that will work in achieving your individual goals.
