Despite the fact that many persons’ behaviour point to the contrary, the average human being is interested in longevity. There must be very few persons in the world, if any at all, who would, with honesty, say that they want to die young. Furthermore, no sane person would wish upon themselves such illness as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancers, and asthma. In fact, at this very moment, there are people seeking treatment or a cure, wherever possible, for all or any of the chronic non-communicable diseases (CNCD) mentioned above.
The question that must therefore be asked is why people would do the very things that have been proven to put them at risk for developing CNCDs. Granted, some of the risk factors are not that obvious. In addition, some CNCDs develop because of external factors, such as the environment or exposure to pollution, over which persons have no control. There are other CNCDs to which some people are predisposed because of their genetic makeup. These, to some extent, they can attempt to control, if they cannot prevent them.
At the same time, there is evidence of people patently avoiding exercise, eating too much and consuming the wrong foods. This newspaper’s ‘What The People Say’ column this week asked Guyanese about their eating habits and several of those interviewed confessed to consuming “junk” food and fried foods. One respondent, a food vendor, said she was conscious of many diabetics who were making healthier eating choices but apart from that had not noticed many changes in food trends over the years. At the same time, the twin ills of alcoholism and smoking tobacco, not to mention the use and abuse of illegal substances have risen to new heights.
In addition, in keeping with their parents’ poor habits, children are becoming increasingly obese and developing other CNCDs as a result. What is sad is that obesity, particularly in children, is still, in too many instances, not seen as a danger. There is still a culture among some people in the Caribbean, of admiring “a nice fat baby” or of seeing an overly chubby toddler or tubby adolescent – signs of a move towards obesity – as “healthy.”
More people die from CNCDs than from homicides, suicides or HIV-related illnesses, all of which are given prominence. In fact, it has been noted that deaths from CNCDs seem to be “acceptable” with hardly any cognizance being given to the fact that the cause of death was a preventable and/or manageable illness.
Caribbean civil society aims to change this, and to this end began a “wellness revolution” two weeks ago in Barbados, through which it hopes to slow down and reverse the development of CNCDs where they already exist, and to prevent them where they do not. In order to accomplish this, civil society will advocate for governments and the private sector to support healthy lifestyles, such as regular physical activity, healthy eating and weight control, no alcohol abuse and no consumption of tobacco or exposure to tobacco smoke.
Some of this will require policy decisions and the enactment of new legislation, which should be no hardship, given that Caricom Heads of Government have already committed to uniting to halt the CNCDs epidemic in the region.
Civil society also intends to use its considerable clout to promote physical activity among all sectors of the population; advocate for healthier diets by ensuring the availability of affordable and nutritious foods. It will do this by moving to have trans fats banned, the input of salt, harmful fats and sugar reduced and regional standards for food labelling instituted. It will also seek the strongest possible implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in those countries that have ratified this treaty, and support ratification in those that have not and promote reduction in harmful alcohol use through policy change among other measures.
By far, the most difficult aspect of all that civil society plans to undertake in its wellness revolution will be transmitting all of this into the daily lives of the average Caribbean citizen. It is well known that behaviour change is quite possibly the most difficult thing to accomplish. There are people who continue to put themselves at risk in the face of most life-threatening illnesses. Having persons agree to move from sedentary to active lifestyles, or change their eating habits in order to live longer mostly only occur after they would have developed the CNCD. Even then, there are those who ‘backslide’ into their old habits of heavy drinking and smoking and eating unhealthily. If the architects of the ‘wellness revolution’ succeed in reaching even a few of these diehards, and they can with the correct approach, then their cause would indeed have been aptly named.
