We are no longer the fattest people in the world. Mexico has surpassed the U.S and taken its place as the most obese developed nation.   

No one likes to be fat and alone. Thank you corporate America for easing our sorrows and ensuring that our obesity epidemic was liberally exported in the form of cheap, over-processed junk food and unethical foreign investments—not to mention, the construction of several new American fast food chains in Mexico—we couldn’t have done it without you.

The recent U.N Report on Mexico’s rising obesity levels reflects the country’s increased consumption of non-nutritional, calorie dense foods, and increased sedentary lifestyles. 

Sound familiar?  It should. Here on the home sweet home front, Americans have mastered the arts of over consumption and habitual inactivity. Obesity rates remain high after skyrocketing over the past two decades, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than one-third of U.S. adults and approximately 17% of children and adolescents aged 2-19 years are obese, according the CDC.

So, we’re destroying our cardiovascular systems one “happy” meal at a time, but how did loosening a few notches in the American belt turn into an obesity epidemic which has permeated national borders?

Through self-interested international arrangements such as NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) the U.S is literally exporting our obesity epidemic.

NAFTA was passed under Fast Track—a short cut through Congress that denied open debate. The result? Small privately owned farms in Mexico were taken over by foreign U.S. investors.  This change forced migration into already overpopulated cities where there was an increasing overabundance of cheap junk food and far less space to move around, according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

After the sketchy passage of NAFTA in 1994, U.S. corporations invested in Mexico’s food systems, resulting in a dramatic increase in availability and consumption of non-nutritious snack foods, soft drinks and processed meat and dairy products, according to the IATP.

Thanks to unethical trade agreements and large agro business “sharing” the U.S.’s genetically modified “wealth,” Mexico has become the second largest receiver of American exports and the chubbiest country in the industrialized world.

In addition to aiding global obesity, trade agreements such as NAFTA have resulted in illegal dumping of toxic waste by U.S. companies in foreign countries.

So, accomplishments include, but are not limited to: deteriorating foreign local economies and packing people into a can of urban sardines and limiting their dietary options.  On top of that, we have managed to do it all with a complete disregard for the health of our fellow humans and our environment.

If we keep it up, we won’t have to worry about terrorism or atomic weapons.  We can take over the world one trade agreement at a time.

We might even be able to kill off our own population as we stuff our faces with heart attacks and wash them down with an ice-cold bottle of Type 2 diabetes.

While we’re at it, we should be sure to throw that plastic bottle right into fragile marine and terrestrial ecosystems (preferably across the border so we don’t have to look at it) so we can take out all other forms of life as our overstressed arteries feebly squeeze their last glucose infested pump of blood.

We can show the planet and all our fellow humans just how much “we’re lovin’ it”!