#mark stevenson

Mexico is seeing the tide turn against high-calorie snacks that experts say have given the country one of the highest rates of childhood obesity and an unusually young coronavirus death toll. The Gulf coast state of Tabasco passed restrictions on the sale of sugary bottled drinks and high-carbohydrate snacks this week, less than two weeks after the southern state of Oaxaca became the first to do so. Legislators in several more states have introduced similar bills, all of which forbid merchants from selling “junk” food to minors unless their parent or guardian is present and approves.

The U.N. Children’s Fund considers childhood obesity to be a health emergency in Mexico, saying the country’s children have the highest consumption of junk food and many get 40% of their total caloric intake from it.

The Tabasco law, passed on a 22-8 vote on Monday, uses verbal gymnastics to try to avoid including traditional snacks in the ban. The Tabasco law “prohibits the sale, distribution, giving, supply or donation of bottled sugary drinks, carbonated sugary drinks, sweets and snacks prepared with mainly refined carbohydrates and solid vegetable fats that contain transfats.” It may be a long haul to enforce the new law, because many packaged snack foods like Doritos chips have already been firmly integrated into Mexican food culture, with “Dorilocos” now a staple at Mexican parks. Preparing “Dorilocos” involves splitting open a bag and adding as many as a dozen ingredients to the chips, some healthy — like celery or tomato — and some decidedly not so, like salted nuts or gummy bears.

Defining “junk food” has become a major challenge in writing the new laws — Oaxaca is still working on drawing up its list — in part because there are a lot of traditional Mexican snack foods that are loaded with sugar, salt and calories. For example, the drink known as “chilate” — variations are known in southern Mexico states as pozol, tejate and a host of other names — has a laundry list of high-calorie ingredients: chocolate, sugar, ground corn or rice, and even sometimes ground-up cookies. It has been consumed in Mexico in some form for hundreds of years. Traditional Mexican sweets are usually almost entirely made up of sugar, salt, tamarind and lime. But because of political and economic concerns and national pride, the lawmakers want to avoid touching traditional snack foods, and instead seek to focus on packaged foods made by multinational companies.