Sugar-Sweetened Beverages, Weight, and Diabetes Kindi Harala, Nutrition Graduate Student

“Obesity and its associated diseases represent a complex physiological system out of balance. It is off kilter and is not unlike the environmental problems of our day – an ecological system turning on us. This balance can be restored but not one without the other. Food may be the medium through which this is done.” (Paraphrased from a participant’s interview quote within a Master’s thesis (1) and based on my experiences within the Woodlands Wisdom Confederation, a partnership among academic institutions who are addressing the increasing rates of diet-related disease in American Indian communities) The increasing rates of obesity have been occurring at the same time as agriculture becomes more technologically industrialized. Industrialized agriculture is associated with decreased biodiversity because as larger tracts of land are converted to agricultural production, the large variety of native flora and fauna species are replaced with a small handful of plant and animal species. Of the 8.9 billion hectares of land on the earth, approximately half of this is devoted to crop and animal production, grown and produced in a commodity-style fashion (2). Thus, agricultural practices have a large influence on reducing ecological biodiversity. However, this agricultural system produces some of the cheapest food in the world, in abundant quantities. In the United States, for most of us, we ar