They need that food now.
The same conclusion applies to many other people in our region – those types who have also become enamored of the American way of life.
As a direct consequence, the Bahamas and its sister nations now face an epidemic of malnutrition and obesity that is surging through this society of ours.
As this nation’s health minister, Dr. Hubert Minnis recently admitted, obesity is essentially the central issue in what is approaching "a serious epidemic of death" due to chronic non-communicable diseases (CNCDs).
As the record shows, when CARICOM heads met in Trinidad to discuss CNCDs, which Dr. Minnis said cost The Bahamas "millions and millions of dollars" annually, and [to discuss] a regional plan to combat the diseases.
We still wait to see results from all of that talk.
But here also note that, we do approve of all that Dr. Hubert Minnis says when he recently suggested that, "we have to ensure that children are eating nice, healthy meals as opposed to the fast foods."
There is information coming in that there has been a significant improvement in the health and nutrition of young children in the English-speaking Caribbean countries in the last thirty years.
It is also evident that obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and cancer have become the major health problems in the countries of the English-speaking Caribbean. And for sure, this just happens to be an urgency whose time has come.
More delay can only lead to even more suffering, more social disaster and more death in a land and in a region that has seen its share of these ills.
We have had occasion and ripe opportunity to lament the fact that far too many Bahamians are today over-fed and malnourished; this due to their choice of meals, morning, noon and night.
Some of our people – inclusive of thousands of our youth – routinely ingest foods that are both unsafe and sadly lacking in much needed nutrients.
Indeed, on any given day of the week we see vendors selling stuff that is surely destructive.
Sadder still happens to be the fact that some of these vendors happen to be women who are themselves working to help feed and clothe their brood.
Sadly, as these poor folk and sufferers do whatever they can to keep body and soul together, they are helping to make things worse for children whose lives are already challenged in these hard times.
Regretfully, these practices are allowed to go on – as if nobody in authority was either watching or caring.
As we go about our daily business, we routinely come across youth and other citizens who are absurdly obese.
On occasion, some of these people come down with any number of chronic diseases. Here we reference ailments that would include [but clearly not exhaust issues like hypertension, diabetes, kidney failure, stroke and cirrhosis of the liver.
Interestingly, most of these are preventable.
But most regrettable happens to be the fact that today’s so-called and often self-described as ‘modern’ Bahamian lives like Americans, suffer like them and thereafter routinely die like them.
And so, having come to maturity in a world where more is routinely conflated with the better, there is today any number of highly Americanized Bahamians who have come to associate glut with nourishment – and who are now quite sick because of this error.
This is sad and regrettable almost in the same amount.
Indeed, like so very many other Bahamians who have felt obliged to listen in on some of the conversations that have taken place in the House of Assembly concerning help for those people who are today quite ill and as to how this or that plan would help, we are duly impressed.
But while we are impressed with what any number of earnest politicians have had to say about the problem at hand, we are still not convinced that enough is being done to put the average Bahamian on a footing where he could attest to the fact that prevention is far better than cure.
Put otherwise, when tens of millions of dollars are being put to the care of people who are already ailing, commonsense dictates that some money – however small – should be earmarked for the launching of any number of pilot-projects.
He we mention those initiatives that would focus on seeing to it that Bahamians – particularly this nation’s youth – have the readiest access to food that is abundant, nutritious and inexpensive.
Evidently, such outlays would be well-spent. And for sure, these social investments would give flesh and real meaning to the proposition that the health of a nation is bound up in the health of its youth.
As they go, so goes this nation and our region.
