Prompt: What are your ideas and thoughts regarding the these two very complex situations?
In a large desert tent in war-torn Sudan, doctors and nurses from an aid agency are hard at work hovering over starving children administering high-calorie biscuits and sugar water in an effort to revive them. The children traveled from miles away, mostly on foot, and all of them are emaciated, with skin stretched tightly across their bones, and with stomachs that, ironically, are distended from a calorie and protein deficiency, known as “kwashiorkor,” that disturbs the water balance of the abdomen.
Half a world away, patients arrive at the cardiac ward of Mt. Sinai hospital in Manhattan, often complaining of chest pains. Doctors prepare some for open-heart surgery, schedule others for angioplasties to open clogged arteries, and administer anti-clotting medication to others. Like the Sudanese children, many of them also have swollen abdomens-in this case from too much food. Many New Yorkers will survive, unlike many Sudanese children, only to return later with similar symptoms. The Sudanese children like many in poor nations, live in the midst of a civil war and are victimized by not having enough food, particularly not enough protein, to support normal health and growth. The New Yorkers, like many affluent people everywhere, are victimized by the proliferation of high-calorie, high-fat foods that are widely available, heavily advertised, and served in huge portions. This has become what Yale psychologist Kelly Brownell calls a “toxic food environment,” in which sweets and fats increasingly crowd out nutritionally complete foods providing essential vitamins and minerals. For instance, one fifth of the “vegetables” eaten today in the United States are French fries and potato chips.
