On Oct. 6, high-school civics teacher Huang I-chung (黃益中) on Facebook slammed a proposed amendment to the School Health Act (學校衛生法) that would extend the ban on the sale of sugary drinks on school campuses to include senior high schools.
Huang said that although sugary drinks have been banned from sale in elementary and junior high schools for many years, there are no fewer overweight children than before, which proves that the ban has been ineffective.
Based on his logic, if people found Taiwanese to be not cultured enough, it could be inferred that civic education has been a failure. In that case, should we drop civics from the curriculum and sack all civics teachers? Surely the correct solution would be to provide more and better civic education, not less.
More than 10 years ago, the John Tung Foundation (董氏基金), the Nutrition Society of Taiwan (營養學會) and other civic groups waged a successful campaign to get sugary drinks off our elementary and junior high school campuses. This example of schoolyard health promotion is quite well known around the world and several nations have followed Taiwan’s example.
The ban might be one reason that only between 20 percent and 30 percent of Taiwanese teenagers are overweight — it might be even more otherwise.
It is true that schools cannot control what their students do off campus and that just altering the campus environment cannot transform students’ drinking and eating habits. Nonetheless, schoolyards are one of the main places for fostering students’ health literacy and encouraging good lifestyle choices from an early age.
Plenty of other nutritionally poor foods and drinks are available off campus, but does that mean there is no need to make sure that school lunches consist of good quality food?
When students step outside their school gates, they see people smoking and see cigarettes for sale. Does that mean that there is no need to ban cigarettes in schools?
Even when people know about nutrition, if food and drinks that are high in fat, sugar and salt are widely available in their daily lives, sheer willpower might not be enough to avoid eating and drinking too much. Changing people’s food and drink environment is a way to help consumers make healthier choices.
Health promotion and tobacco prevention are tasks that require government action. The latest WHO Global Burden of Disease Study indicates that one in five deaths worldwide is caused in part by poor diet, including consuming too much sugar, salt and fat, and not enough fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds.
The high prevalence of chronic diseases among Taiwanese cannot be lightly attributed to the “aging tidal wave,” because an aging population does not necessarily mean that a lot of people will have chronic illnesses.
Taiwan does face a rising prevalence of chronic diseases, which are also affecting an increasing number of young people. This problem is becoming a major national economic and social crisis. As well as creating a huge financial burden on the National Health Insurance program and long-term care provision, it will also pose the greatest challenge to intergenerational equity, as it places an unbearable burden on the next generation of young people.
Encouraging people both in and outside of school to cut their consumption of sugary, salty and fatty foods and drinks is not a pie-in-the-sky policy, but one that helps people attain their basic human rights of food safety and personal health.
Wayne Gao is an assistant professor on Taipei Medical University’s master’s program in global health and development.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past