Q&A | Rocio Medina – Vice President, Worldwide Nutrition Training: ‘We are living in an epidemic of bad nutrition and obesity’

Former nutrition and obesity professor Rocio Medina, who is one of the designers of a new study program to train professionals in the field at the University of Monterrey in Mexico, visited Macau as part of the “Herbalife Asia Pacific Wellness Tour 2017.” Medina is also the vice president of Herbalife’s Nutrition Institute.

Since starting her private practice in Mexico in 1994, Medina has been addressing multiple issues related to bad nutrition and its consequences in Mexico – a country that is known as the “The Fattest Country of the World” because Mexico’s obesity rate is    extremely high.

To learn more about these topics and their relation to the modern lifestyle, and the growth of obesity cases in the region, the Times spoke to Dr Medina on the sidelines of the Herbalife tour at Landmark Hotel in Macau.

Macau Daily Times (MDT) – As an urban society, Macau is facing the same challenges as other developed societies. Is obesity a worldwide problem?

Rocio Medina (RM) – There are currently trends that we are living worldwide and HK and Macau are not an exception. They are growing markets [for our products] because we are living in an epidemic of bad nutrition and obesity. The latest surveys show a growth [in the number of people who are overweight] in most of the age groups, with the exception of the older ones, but even those results [of Body Mass Index (BMI)] are due mostly to the loss of fat mass and not fat, which leads us to talk now about body composition instead of just weight. We are trying to educate our members and let them know that obesity is not just overweight, it’s about how your body is composed.

MDT – What are these problems related to? Is it just about what we eat?

RM – The lifestyles that we are living right now don’t make it easy for us to get good nutrition. It’s really difficult these days with everyone rushing, women working … we don’t have time to have meals in a balanced way.

MDT – The last survey done in Macau in 2015 found that between 15-20 percent of the population between the ages of four and 22 were facing obesity problems – a growth of more than three percent compared to 2010. Is it what we are feeding our youth that is the major problem?

RM – What I think is that parents are not at home anymore, since they are working, and kids are not as active as they used to be. As parents, we want to keep our kids safe at home, and so we provide them tools that are convenient to keep them at home. They are not doing enough exercise, they are more sedentary and we bring home fast food that is cheap and convenient, sometimes because we don’t have time to prepare meals.

With all this, we are giving them the wrong idea and the wrong knowledge of what good nutrition is, and since we are not at home we don’t push them to eat vegetables and fruits, and they are not as tasty as pastries and cakes and sweets, and we let them eat whatever they want because we are working. So it’s in fact a combination of factors that are leading our young generation to increase their weight and the fat in their body composition, and of course this results in what we have been seeing in the last years regarding health conditions in younger people that we didn’t used to see 20 or 30 years ago. Diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia – those were health condition for older people (40 years old and above) but now we see them in very young people: kids and teenagers.

MDT – In your opinion, what is the role of schools in regards to this particular topic or educating young generations?

RM – I think education is a key point. It is really important to educate our kids in the field of nutrition, but [it is also the role of] the family, as what we are doing at home is crucial.

I will give you the example of Mexico, [one of the world’s leading countries] on obesity. The government started a program in schools that prohibited the sale of junk food, but you know what happened? The parents provided the junk food to the kids and they took it to school. There wasn’t any good result after that program.

So I think the government, society and family should all have that knowledge. Of course the government can and should invest in education of the parents and kids from a very young age, so they can receive that education at home and at school.

School is very important, and we can and should have at least one nutrition class from kindergarten, but family plays a very important role. We need to follow the same path, otherwise kids get confused. If their parent is giving them junk food and the school is saying it is bad [to eat those foods], of course they will believe their parents more. They won’t think their parents aren’t doing a good thing for them. We need to be consistent on this.