France is a huge country and gets French-administrated territories and departments overseas. Reunion Island, French Guyana, The Comoros, the Antilles, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon take part of the 9 French overseas departments and territories.The population reached almost 2,700,000 people in 2013. Whereas the French law and regulation applied in French overseas department is the same than the French territory. Adaptations to suit the department’s particular needs are necessary as the French overseas territories do not follow the same law and regulation except in some fields – defense, international relations, trade and currency, judicial and administrative law.
This make us come to the point: the trade law used to be different in some points: FOT and FOD used to have the monopoly of most sugary aliments and did not follow the same regulation in this field. Even more astonish is that milky products – above all yogurts – and sodas sugar contents were 50% higher than the metropolitan. This is the reason why there is currently an increasing gap in figures on obesity between France and its overseas lands.
Alarming gaps in figures
Indeed, 50% of the people in FOT and FOD are in a case of obesity compared to 34% of the people in France. Even more shocking is that the French territory counts 63 million inhabitants against only 2.7 million inhabitants in the FOT and FOD, where the proportion of obese people is so much higher. Not to mention other diseases among the population – diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension – well above the figures in France metropolitan. The most impressive are the figures about children suffering from obesity: 9% of children are obese overseas against 3.4% of children in the mainland.
Why did we used to have such a disparity between sugar doses?
Industrial remarks are irritating, when you consider that 1 adult out of 2 suffers from obesity. The first step seems to forbid industrials to add such amount of sugar during the production process. Indeed, industrials pretend that people overseas would not buy their products anymore with sugar adjustments to national rates, mainly because they are “used to drink over sugary products”.
The reason why industrials add twice more sugar in overseas sodas is that they can adapt the fabrication process and the formulas at their discretion. Moreover, according to the French overseas minister, Victorin Lurel, natural yogurts in some FOD contain sugar as there is no local dairy sector. As a consequence, they use more lactose in their products, a high sugar content ingredient.
The reply of the French National Assembly
Fortunately, for the French government and for everyone, this situation was not bearable anymore. The French National Assembly has voted a new law in March 2013 about an alignment with the metropolitan on overseas sugary product content, and on their expiry dates – 55 days overseas to 30 days in the metropolitan.
This was the first step in the fight against obesity. Now, prevention towards the overseas population is a second important step as people have to move towards better ways of consumption and healthier ways of life, including health food and sport activities.
By Sparkling Kiwi!
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