"The Cuban diet – eat less, exercise more – and preventable deaths are halved," is the advice in The Independent.
This is not a new Latin diet and dance fad, but news based on research into how Cuba’s rollercoaster economic history has affected the health of the Cuban people.
The study suggests that population-wide health initiatives that encourage people to eat less and exercise more could achieve significant positive health outcomes. The question is – how, in an affluent Western democracy, do you encourage people to eat less and exercise more if they are not forced to do so?
It was reported accurately in the papers, although headlines like the Daily Mail’s “Lose weight the CUBAN way” and The Independent’s “The Cuban diet” trivialise the hardship that Cuban people underwent during the time in question. While they did enjoy a drop in cardiovascular disease and diabetes deaths during this period, they also experienced a sharp rise in malnutrition-associated disorders, such as neuropathies (nerve damage).
The researchers also drew on national surveys of 14,304 people in 1995, 22,851 people in 2001, and 8,031 people in 2010, which assessed risk factors for chronic disease. They obtained data on diabetes rates from Cuban health registries spanning the period 1980–2009. They obtained information on mortality from diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer and all causes for the period 1980–2010 from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health.
The authors suggest that a modest reduction in calorie consumption would “reverse the global obesity epidemic” and reduce deaths from diabetes by half and CHD by a third.