Every morning at dawn, the food is dished out to Thailand’s monks in abundance: donations of sticky rice, cakes, noodles, sweet pudding, dumplings, shop-bought snacks and Thai desserts coated with condensed milk and coconut cream.
Yet, the tradition of giving food, known as alms, to the monks every morning as a way to accumulate karma for this life and the next has precipitated an obesity crisis amongst the clergy.
Contrary to the well-known depiction of a Buddha as a man with a vast round belly and several chins — taken from the Chinese folklore of an eccentric 10th century monk — until recently the 300,000 monks in Thailand have traditionally kept trim and healthy by fasting after midday.
Photo: AFP
While they still fast, the food and drinks that they consume every morning are so unhealthy that the number of overweight and unhealthy monks now exceeds the national average, with a 45 percent rate of obesity, 6.5 percent rate of diabetes, and extremely high rates of heart disease and high cholesterol.
Modern lifestyles and high-sugar foods have been blamed. Thailand is one of the fattest countries in Asia, second only to neighboring Malaysia. Monks have no choice but to eat the food that is donated, and it is traditional for people to donate their favorite foods, or the favorite foods of their dead relatives, meaning that puddings and sweets feature heavily in monks’ diets.
Senior members of the Sangha — the Buddhist council — as well as academics and the Thai government have come together in an attempt to solve the obesity crisis as a matter of urgency, after it was described as a “ticking time bomb,” and have drawn up a mandatory Heath Charter for Monks, which is slowly being implemented at temples across Thailand
Sugary drinks, one of the only things they are allowed after midday, were a major contributor to the expanding waistlines of monks, said Supreda Adulyanon, CEO of ThaiHealth, the government health agency.
“Of course it’s related to their unhealthy habits. For example, 43 percent are smokers and only 44 percent that exercise do it three times a week, which means that the majority don’t exercise enough,” Adulyanon said.
Thai health last year funded a “healthy monk, healthy nutrition” project that helped a selection of monks across Thailand slim down.
It created special belts for the monks’ waists to help them monitor when their weight went up or down, trained temple chefs how to cook healthily and published healthy recipe pamphlets to hand out in the community, encouraging people to cook and donate healthier food.
Monks often live an unhealthily sedentary lifestyle, but exercise is a particularly sensitive subject. They must not appear to be vain and cannot wear shoes — two factors that make working out and fitness something of a spiritual minefield.
Exercise is “complicated” for monks, but “not impossible,” said Phra Promwachirayan, the abbot of Yannawa Temple and head of public welfare for the Sangha supreme council of Thailand, who has been leading the charge for monks to change their unhealthy ways.
“Monks should exercise, but it is difficult for us,” he said. “You can only do fast walking or maybe a walking meditation. Yoga can also be fine, but not in public.”
“A treadmill is all right, but only a flat one and only indoors,” Promwachirayan added.
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