Counting calories

MONTERREY – In Mexico City, you see people in the streets during the morning rush hour clutching Coca-Cola in plastic bottles.

It’s the Mexicans’ water and sugar fix combined. Mexico City has the highest per capita Coca-Cola consumption in the world, with each of its 24 million population guzzling three eight-ounce bottles a day. In comparison, Filipinos drink one eight-ounce Coke every three days.

And what are the obesity and diabetes rates in Mexico City?

Coca-Cola Company and its largest independent bottler, Mexican-controlled FEMSA, don’t like such questions.

Monterrey-based FEMSA, or Fomento Economico Mexicano, S.A.B. de CV, with 110,000 regular employees worldwide (about 10,000 in the Philippines), thinks its size has made it an easy target for healthy nutrition activists.

“We’re supposed to be the kings of obesity,” Coca-Cola-FEMSA CEO John Santa Maria lamented.

Santa Maria and other FEMSA officials point out that sugar accounts for less than two percent of the caloric intake of Filipinos, with rice making up the bulk of about 50 percent. In Mexico, about 50 percent of the calories also come from carbohydrates, mostly tortillas and other corn-based products.

Santa Maria told a group of visiting Filipino journalists in Mexico City that the problem in the Philippines is malnutrition, the lack of protein, and “kids unable to go to school because they’ve had no breakfast.”

Assuming the post of CEO only two months ago, Santa Maria said his “biggest challenge” in the Philippines is a proposal in Congress to slap a 10 percent ad valorem tax on soft drinks and carbonated beverages sold in bottles, cans and similar containers.

This will be on top of the value added tax, income tax, withholding tax, local and real property taxes plus customs duties imposed on the soft drink industry.

Apart from promoting a healthier lifestyle by dampening demand for soft drinks, the new tax is seen to raise up to P10.5 billion, which will be used for rehabilitation and livelihood development in areas devastated by powerful typhoons.

Coca-Cola FEMSA, which started operations in the Philippines only last year, donated 70,000 cases of bottled water to areas flattened by Super Typhoon Yolanda.

“It’s a whole different issue,” Santa Maria said. “To me it is a profound mistake… Nowhere in the world have we seen a tax change consumption patterns or nutrition habits… It’s a matter of how you live.”

*      *      *

Who should be blamed for obesity and Type 2 diabetes: the food purveyor or the consumer?

Processed food and fast-food giants have long complained that they don’t force anyone to buy their products so their companies shouldn’t be blamed for nutrition-related health issues.

The other side of the debate is that the food industry deliberately packages and markets products to encourage consumers to eat beyond healthy nutritional requirements. This is apart from reports about the use of ingredients in processed food that are hazardous to health.

While insisting that no one points a gun to any consumer’s head to make him scarf high-fat, high-calorie, sugar-laden treats, the food industry knows it cannot afford to ignore criticism about promoting unhealthy eating habits.

Food giants like Coca-Cola are confronting the problem by producing healthier alternatives to their classic bestsellers.

Products are tweaked not only for healthier content but also in serving size. Morgan Spurlock’s movie “Super Size Me” seems to have had a profound impact.

*      *      *

Food giants targeted by health activists are also moving to make their brands environment-friendly.

In the case of Coca-Cola, this means putting its wide range of products into thinner plastic containers and launching the PlantBottle, made (as the name implies) from plants.

PlantBottle is not yet in the Philippines. FEMSA tracks consumption patterns in its markets. These studies have shown that Filipino Coke consumers prefer glass bottles, which can be returned for a refund.

Juan Carlos Dominguez, Coca-Cola FEMSA’s corporate affairs director for Asia, says breakable bottles can be reused up to 30 times before becoming vulnerable to contamination.

The company is also addressing concerns about its products’ sugar content. Coca-Cola is currently using stevia, a natural sweetener derived from a plant, for the company’s low-sugar products.

At the same time, FEMSA researchers at the Monterrey Biotechnology Center are working on substances derived from plants to control weight gain and improve sugar metabolization.

Broccoli sprouts, for example, may be used to lower cholesterol. Nopal, the prickly cactus that is featured prominently in Mexican cuisine, is anti-glycemic, according to molecular biologist Manuel Zertuche Guerra, director of the biotechnology and food research center at the Monterrey Institute of Technology.

Among the substances being developed in the center that may soon be found in Coca-Cola FEMSA products is one that can boost the protein content of carbohydrate-based staples in the developing world.

Zertuche says the healthy protein alternative can also be used for cheese, ice cream and meats. We sampled a sausage with 30 percent of the protein provided by the new product. There was also zero-fat, zero-calorie, no added sugar vanilla ice cream sweetened by a combination of stevia and sucralose. The taste seems good enough for people with high sugar and cholesterol problems.

Even as food giants develop healthier alternatives, FEMSA corporate communications director Carolina Alvear emphasizes, “The thing is you have to balance how much you eat and move.”

In my case, when people ask me how I keep my weight down, I have two answers. One, the flippant answer, is that I have parasites.

The second, which is the serious answer, is simple: eat only what you can burn. Eat less.