They grow it, but they don’t eat it

SALINAS
February 16, 2006 6:10am

Farmworkers who harvest the fruits and vegetables that feed the nation aren't eating enough of it themselves, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The Stanford study looked at Salinas farmworkers.

It found that they’re eating at fast-food restaurants where the food is high-fat but low-cost. As a result, despite long hours working in the fields, the farmworkers -- particularly those single, young men living in the agricultural labor camps -- are facing a very American problem: obesity.

"They often eat someplace that's cheap and fast with high fat content," says Marilyn Winkleby, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

She is the senior author of the study published in the February issue of the journal Ethnicity and Health that examines the changes in cancer-related health behaviors within the Salinas Latino population who led the study.

"Their jobs are becoming increasingly mechanized and less active," she says.

Ms. Winkleby’s study is based on questioning almost 2,000 Hispanic women and men from both the community at large and those living in 29 agricultural labor camps in Monterey County between 1990 and 2000. The goal was to detect changes in diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol use as well as cancer health screenings in order to help design future public health interventions

Not all the news was bad. Among the positive behavior changes noted in the survey were continued low rates of smoking among both women and men and a substantial drop in alcohol consumption among men.

But most striking among the results were the increasing obesity rates, particularly within the labor camps. All populations, both men and women, had reached 60 percent rates of being overweight or obese by the year 2000. There was an increase in obesity of 90 percent within the labor camps.

The majority of the Mexican-American population in Salinas has now been living in the United States for at least 10 years, long enough to have been exposed to the "high-fat, low-exercise American environment," the study states.

On the positive side, there were some changes in diet that showed marked improvements: a shift away from the use of whole-fat to lower-fat milk among both labor camp men and women from the community and a decrease in the use of lard or meat fat for cooking among men and women within the community. Fried food remained high on the menu.

Also on the positive side, the surveys showed significant increases in screenings for both breast and cervical cancer with a significant increase in the rates of pap screenings and mammograms. Mammography screenings showed especially large gains, from 15 percent in 1990 to 53 percent in 2000.

But researchers were concerned that annual testing for colon cancer remained infrequent at about half the percentage of the non-Hispanic white population.

"If you want to effect change it's not enough to educate people," says Ms. Winkleby. "Individual behavior is influenced by the environments in which you live. Men living in the labor camps are primarily single, poor; they live in housing without cooking facilities."