World's most obese nation Tonga should probably blame mutton flaps

Photo BBC

The Pacific island of Tonga is the most obese country in the world. Up to 40 percent of the population is thought to have type 2 diabetes and life expectancy is falling. One of the main causes is a cheap, fatty kind of meat — mutton flaps — imported from New Zealand.
With a stern expression crossing her face, 82-year-old Papiloa Bloomfield Foliaki almost leaps from her seat to show us something she says will help us understand.
She comes back into the sitting room of her small hotel in Nuku A'Lofa, Tonga's capital, brandishing a large model of an ancient wooden boat.
"We Tongans rowed here, across thousands and thousands of miles of sea, in boats like these. Then we flipped them over and used the old boats as houses."
She frowns. "But, nobody wants Tongan houses anymore, because something Western, something modern, people think is better. People associated Tongan style of homes with poverty.
"Just like with our food."
The traditional Tongan diet is fish, root vegetables and coconuts, as you might expect for a palm-fringed island in the middle of the Pacific.
But at some point in the middle of the 20th century, offcuts of meat began arriving in the Pacific islands — including turkey tails from the US and mutton flaps from New Zealand.

They were cheap and became hugely popular.
"People think something imported is superior," says Foliaki, a former nurse, activist and politician, who now works in the hotel business, despite being one of few Tongans over the age of 80.
"And you have a situation where fishermen spear their fish — sell it — and go and buy mutton flaps. People don't have the education to know what is bad for their health."

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