this meat isn't sold in other countries did you know that an obesity crisis among specific Islanders this is the story of how a once healthy island nation became the most obese country in the world in a population with the highest prevalence of diabetes ever discovered nauru located off the coast of Australia has a population of about 11 000 people and 94.5 percent of them are classified as critically overweight with a whopping 71.7 of the entire country classified as obese and that number is growing nauru's experiencing the fastest BMI increase in the world with rates four
times higher than the rest of the world but how exactly does an entire island nation become obese and strangely the surrounding Islands the islands around nauru they make up the most obese countries in the world how can this be what is going on out there well as we'll see what's been happening in nauru is really an amplified version of what's been happening in the rest of the world but before we get into to it a message from our sponsor this video is sponsored by fabulous do you find it hard to rewire your brain and adopt
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in all the programs and exercises the premium features really round out the app in my opinion start building your ideal daily routine the first 100 people who click on the link will get 25 off a fabulous subscription thanks again to Fabulous for sponsoring this video to understand why these populations are struggling with obesity we first need to understand some backstory nauru was once a lush green Island Paradise isolated from the rest of the world it was a fully self-sustaining ecosystem where the inhabitants lived and thrived in tribal communities then now ruins made a living through
mostly fishing and Gathering and enjoyed a traditional diet of fresh raw fish root vegetables nuts coconuts and fruits surviving and thriving this way for thousands of years that is until they were accidentally discovered by the Western World in the year 1899 a New Zealand prospector noticed that a nauru and rock was loaded with an extremely valuable mineral phosphate by 1906 the beautiful and Tiny island nation of nauru was seized and turned into what essentially amounts to one big strip mine the governments of Germany Britain Australia and New Zealand seized control of nauru's natural resources and
established a trust to govern and oversee what would become first and last industry phosphate is the only economic resource of the island mining phosphate is a huge and costly undertaking the mining would continue for over 100 years and bring in billions of dollars and new people from all over the West to nauru nauru's natural resources and mining industry were returned to the now independent nauruan people and the country entered a golden age even briefly becoming quote the smallest and wealthiest independent democracy in the world with the LA Times reporting in 1985 that in an ocean
whose island people usually make do with thatched roof huts and Outrigger canoes the no ruins spread out in ranch style solar-powered homes with at least one Land Rover and usually a powerboat in every driveway so where did it all go horribly wrong how can phosphate mining have an effect on the health and waste signs of an entire country well it turns out that phosphate is the key ingredient in fertilizer in a sad Twist of irony the 43 million ton tons of phosphates sucked out of nauru were shipped around the world to other countries to help
them grow their food and phosphate mining is incredibly destructive it involves stripping away large layers of Earth to reach the minerals below leaving behind Barren Jagged heaps of petrified coral unsuitable for building agriculture or plant life of any form over the course of the 20th century 90 percent of the island nation was decimated quote inch for inch nauru is the most environmentally ravaged Nation on earth a far cry from the Abundant Tropical Paradise it once was it has become a gray desolate Wasteland where almost nothing grows the now ruin people have been pushed to the
only habitable land left a 4.2 kilometer strip of Coastline by the year 2000 nearly 100 percent of the phosphate had been stripped from nauru when the phosphate ran out so did the money and the opportunities for employment sending nauru into poverty and obesity but how exactly does that make people obese well with the island nation's resources so depleted the people of nauru can no longer grow their own food even fishing is more difficult as researchers estimate that approximately 40 percent of nauru's marine life has been lost due to pollution today nauru is almost 100 percent
reliant on Imports unable to support itself without outside assistance from the countries that left it in shambles they even need to import their drinking water thanks to runoff from the mining sites contaminating all the fresh water on the island now most of their water is shipped in on a tanker from Australia making it cheaper to buy soda in nauru than drinking water and this is where the nutrition transition issue on nauru starts to unfold the term nutrition transition is defined as the transition of developing countries from their traditional nutrient-rich diet to a western diet and
overall way of life thanks to contamination the narrow and staple of freshly caught fish has been replaced with canned tuna and spam they're traditional carbs of coconut breadfruit pineapple and many other once abundant natural fruits have taken a back seat to white rice instant noodles sugar chocolate chips candies and beer and the meat being an island nauru traditionally didn't have access to much meat at all but today they are eating a lot of meat if you could even call it that this meat isn't sold in other countries did you know that um Pacific Islanders have
a love affair with some extremely questionable meat dropped off on their country by Australia and America ever heard of a mutton flap or turkey tail now it's marketed as a turkey tail but it's actually an oil filled gland that attaches the feathers to the turkey's body about 75 of the calories from this so-called Tale come from Pure fat making it extremely unhealthy and also cheap with so many Choice cuts of meat available at home the American Market never had much of a taste for turkey tails and is turkey production ramped up in the 1950s rather
than let them go to waste the American poultry industry saw a business opportunity the target Pacific island communities where animal protein was scarce New Zealand and Australia followed suit dumping off their mutton flat or sheep bellies what was once a meat waste product unfit for consumption in the west and today sold mostly as dog food here at home became a coveted item in these Pacific island communities where meat was rare and expensive by 2007 inhabitants were consuming more than 44 pounds of turkey tails every year only two generations later many people across the Pacific Islands
even consider these waste Meats part of their National Cuisine with fresh locally sourced food becoming more rare and therefore expensive cheap processed foods are now the norm in these countries it's a time bomb they have gone from a rural lifestyle eating fish and vegetables to the very very worst of Western lifestyles in one or two generations and they are paying the price when the phosphate money started rolling in for the naroons the Western Way of Life seemed like a glamorous upgrade and it wasn't just food that was imported here with all the new people on
the island it was a new mindset a new way of thinking they rapidly went from living off the land spending most of their time fishing and Gathering to living extremely sedentary Lifestyles brainwashed with the ideals of Western Civilization the locals even started buying cars to get around the island even though it reportedly takes less than 20 minutes to drive around the entire thing once a police officer on the island imported a Lamborghini only to be too fat to drive it by the time it arrived and after just a few short generations of living and eating
like the Western World the health of the entire South Pacific is in crisis Chloe May has Type 2 diabetes brought on by obesity she's going blind and she's had two toes amputated she's 28. in Fiji diabetes leads to an amputation every 12 hours in American Samoa a corner reflects that the caskets keep getting larger and the dead are trending younger every year in the island of Guam was home to the famous and tragic story of Ricky naputi the 900 pound man who passed away at just 39 years old after reaching over 900 pounds diagnosis of
diabetes are in the Pacific are now the highest in the world with nearly half of all adults suffering from the life-threatening condition A Century of exploitation has left the Pacific Islands devoid of their health and unable to do anything about it obviously the Western way of life and processed food in particular has some serious flaws if its introduction involves the decimation of an entire area of the world and the whole story clearly demonstrates the massive role that lifestyle and food and movement plays in our health anyway I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I
will see you in the next one foreign [Music]
