I wish Chuukese people would watch Mary Poppins and hear her endearing song about how adding “just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine goes down”. I used to understand the lyrics as explaining that if you add a little bit of sugar, then the medicine will be tasty and easy to swallow. But the Chuukese need to take a different moral from the story. They need to realize that “just a spoonful” of sugar is enough. Not six.
I don’t think that anything I write down on this page will properly represent the enormous amounts sugar consumed in Chuuk. I would confidently make a wager with anyone that the state of Chuuk, particularly the people I know, have the highest per capita consumption of sugar in the world. Probably in the history of the world.
Sugar was not introduced to these islands until the modern era of colonization and I don’t know when it became so plentiful, but now it has become the mainstay of their diet. As opposed to many other tropical islands, there is very little sugar cane that grows here. Nonetheless they import it by the boatload. It overflows out of their drinks, cakes their counterops, sticks on their fingers and courses through their bodies. Sugar can be added to anything, and it often is.
Let me just throw out a few examples of sugar use that are commonplace in Chuuk. In most places it is quite normal to add some sugar to your coffee. Some people prefer one spoon and other prefer two. But in Chuuk, the average person will put somewhere between 4 and 7 heaping spoonfuls in a single cup of coffee. And the average adult will drink around 3 cups of coffee a day.
The overload of sugar in coffee is unhealthy, but understandable. What I cant quite wrap my head around is the insistence to never drink a glass of water that isnt clouded with mounds of sugar. My host family members will scoop the same half dozen spoonfuls of sugar into their water before gulping it down. They don’t do this to savor the taste, because water is almost never drank slowly. It is usually pounded down in a single gulp or two. The need for sugar is just normalized. I once saw my host brother spit out a sip of water from a glass that someone had brought him and yell in anger, “Met ei! ese wor suke”( “what is this! No sugar!”)
Sugar abundance can be problematic for adults, but the real issue that bothers me is with the kids. Kids have no limit on the amount of sugar they consume. Two year old babies drink coffee every morning, with the same ratio of sugar. My little host sister will throw a temper tantrum if you try to serve her water that isnt saturated in sugar. Candy is eaten at an amazing rate and shows up a lot more than you might expect in such a remote location.
The effects of this massive sugar eating bonanza are obvious throughout the community. The children of Chuuk are some of the cutest creatures on earth with their round features, big eyes and soft brown skin….until they open their mouths. The horrific portraits of children’s mouths are in stark contrast to their beautiful faces. Four year old kids have nothing but rotten brown stubs poking out from their gums. Black chunks of decomposing bone shards sit where their baby teeth should be. There is only a short period from about the ages of 8-20, where most people have a healthy set of teeth. At this stage, they have some of the most amazing smiles on the planet. Big white gems sparkle from their wide mouths. But eventually the sugar and betelnut wreak their havoc and turn mouths in blacken abysses of disgusting slosh with bits of fake gold spotted throughout.
The teeth are ugly to look at and put a stain on the beauty of these appealing islanders, but that is just aesthetic. The real problem is with diabetes. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that more than 50% of the adult women that I know have Type 2 diabetes. More than half of them! The men also have an alarmingly high rate, but the women are the real victims. Drinking the oil from tuna cans, using a centimeter thick pool of grease to cook a slice of Spam, and dousing everything in salt don’t help either; but the real killer is the sugar.
I teach a health class to my students and have been trying to bring the knowledge into their households, but I feel that it is to little avail. Really the entire purpose of teaching my health class to make them realize that sugar is fucking up their bodies. However, it is just too tasty. They know its bad, but they don’t stop. Ladies with diabetes go to the doctor and are told that they must control their sugar intake, but their habits don’t alter.
I am usually not very critical of the island folk here in Chuuk, but this is probably my biggest bone to pick with them. The sugar is over running their lives and its deleterious effects are creating a health epidemic.
Love this. Sugar was a bit more precious in the Mortlocks, I never saw anyone putting it in plain water. But they would add sugar to the premixed Tang and double the recipe for Kool Aid. They'd even add it to the fake milk when they mixed water with Carnation.
ReplyDeleteBut Americans drink a lot of sugar too, we just don't see it. Soda, fruit juice, cookies, muffins, cereal, even ketchup are loaded with sugar. It's not as overt as four spoonfuls of sugar in a cup of coffee, but it's still in our diet.