The Philippines is transforming primary school yards into vegetable gardens in a bid to fight US-inspired junk food addictions that are causing an explosion of health problems throughout society.
At one of the showcase schools in Manila for the burgeoning health food project, teachers and students are joined by parents in tending lush plots that have an assortment of vegetables.
Every available space is used to grow nutritious greens that are harvested in cycles — as free food for the school’s mostly poor students or sold as part of a livelihood project for their families.
Where there is no soil, portable hydroponic gardening is promoted using discarded plastic bottles as water receptacles for plants that hang symmetrically in rows.
“It’s amazing what many things you can do with a little innovation and a little bit of imagination,” said Paranaque Central Elementary School principal Edita Baggayan, 65, while inspecting some tomatoes in a mini-greenhouse. “Children here are taught proper nutrition, and we involve parents in the project because we want to take families away from a lifestyle of eating junk foods.”
Nearby, boys in khaki trousers are busy removing weeds and watering the upcoming harvest.There is a row of cabbages, vines with budding luffa fruits and winter melons that are typically used in a variety of traditional Filipino dishes that are fast vanishing from dining tables in favor of take out and instant foods.
Broccoli and cauliflower were last season’s harvests, but they will be grown again in the second semester, Baggayan said.
Students hungrily tucked into their chicken-vegetable soup at lunchtime, with some going back for second servings.
School nutritionist and cook Dulce Aranda said the program was having measurable impacts.
She said 100 of the most undernourished children among the roughly 3,000 students were picked for a feeding program using the harvested vegetables when the initiative was launched last year.
“Our charts now show they are more healthy, attentive and are performing better in school,” Aranda said.
“We just hope they will carry this through when they grow up. There are just too many people who are unhealthy,” Aranda said.
Fast-food outlets are perhaps even more ubiquitous in the Philippines than in the US, which once ruled the Southeast Asian nation as a colonial power.
The Philippines has a wildly popular home-grown fast-food chain that has outlets even in remote towns, while the famous US brands are also widespread. In homes, rice remains a staple for most meals, but accompanying dishes are typically fried and heavy in oil. As a result, lifestyle diseases such as hypertension and diabetes are ravaging the adult population, especially people aged in their 20s to 40s, leading to a bonanza for pharmaceutical firms.
“Everything now is fast or processed food,” said doctor Carmela Pagunsan, medical director at the Manila unit of French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Aventis. “We have bad eating diets and sedentary lifestyles. Parents and their children don’t go out and do physical activity anymore, don’t eat vegetables and fruits. If you go to the malls now, you will see many overweight children and young adults. They have not been trained to be fit, to have proper diets.”
She said the problem was also cultural in nature, with Filipinos having a propensity to over indulge in salty, fatty and very sweet foods, particularly during festivals and celebrations.
The government’s National Nutrition Survey in 2009 showed that 27 percent of adults were overweight, while 25 percent reported having hypertension.
“That is a gross under--estimation in my view,” Pagunsan said. “Because there are many more people out there who don’t know they are hypertensive, who don’t get the medicines they need and who don’t see a doctor for consultation. And because they go undiagnosed, they do not have any compulsion to control their lifestyles, not knowing that complications are already setting in.”
The education department launched the vegetable project last year and hopes to replicate its success nationwide to produce a new generation of health conscious Filipinos.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS