A nation becoming overweight

I was in Dhaka after four years for nineteen days. I was super excited about my trip. I was hoping to see positive changes — the new Mirpur-Airport Road flyover, the Hatirjheel project, etc. But it was something else beside the above-mentioned that caught my attention and made me fearful… the mushrooming of restaurants in Dhaka city.

Growing up, fast food was something we ate only a handful of times every month. We would go to a Chinese restaurant on special occasions like birthday, parents’ marriage anniversary and own or sibling’s satisfactory performance in the yearly school exam.

Dhaka did not have fancy fast food restaurants at that time. It was probably Helvetia and Dominous Pizza, which brought about a revolution in the fast food industry of the country. But before that, most of us would eat burgers, vegetable rolls, chicken or beef patties and sandwiches from local fast food shops that were neither chains nor franchises.

Then slowly, days began to change and new restaurants began to make space for themselves in the metropolis. But today’s Dhaka is a city of restaurants where probably any kind of food is available to satiate your gustatory demands.

I saw big and small restaurants in every neighborhood I had been to. Dhaka literally seemed to me a city of restaurants. It also seemed as if people’s highest interest now lies around food and only food.

Every day, I see several check-ins on my Facebook newsfeed. Almost all of these check-ins are from Dhaka’s various restaurants, restaurants that are fancy, expensive and whose dishes look simply delicious.

For the past two years, I have been seeing check-ins from restaurants whose names I never heard when I lived in Dhaka. Of course, I never heard their names because they did not exist at that time. It is good that so many people are making money by investing in the food business but my question is: what are the long-term health effects of eating restaurant food?

I never saw an excessively fat person during my 25 years in Dhaka but in nineteen days, I spotted three morbidly obese men and women in Dhaka’s various restaurants. Here in the United States, where 35.7 per cent of the population are obese, spotting an obese man on the street is like spotting a bird sitting on a tree. But in Dhaka, the sight of these three men and women caught me by surprise. The purpose of this article is not to offend any person or party but to try to create an awareness about the harmful side effects of eating restaurant food on a daily or regular basis.

Most of my friends and family appeared to have gained weight in the past four years. I saw plenty of potbellies during my last Dhaka visit. The question that I myself heard most during my vacation was: how do you manage to look the same? You don’t even look like you have a daughter. The question obviously flattered me but I knew that most of the credit to looking young goes to a healthy diet, something that my friends and family are missing out on terribly because of a lifestyle change that hit the country.

Restaurant foods have very high calorie counts. They are rich in unhealthy saturated and trans fats, cholesterol, sugar and salt, all of which contribute to rapid weight gain, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancer and other chronic diseases.

In nineteen days, I realised that many people are not even aware of the adverse side effects of eating out. For many, eating-out is a recreation and symbol of high social status. I saw children as young as two years old munching on potato chips and watching TV. Are we trying to raise couch potatoes ?

I saw grandparents happily feeding their grandchildren deep-fried drumsticks, french fries and cola. Most of these grandparents are not even aware of the harm that they are causing to these little ones.

While in the United States, the government and the non-government organisations are actively trying to reduce obesity and encourage healthy eating, we, the Bangladeshis, are actively choosing high-calorie, high-fat restaurant food over healthy home-made Bengali cuisine.

If the trend continues, there will soon come a day when a certain section of the population will not only become overweight but also suffer lifelong from diet-related chronic diseases.

The Daily Star
Date of publication: Nov. 5, 2013