The Mexican epidemic of obesity and the North American Free Trade Agreement

摘要

We have read with great interest the paper by Clark et al.} published in a recent issue of your journal (International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 2012). They hypothesize that NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) changed the Mexican food environment and affected the diet quality and the risk of becoming overweight and obese. This claim is substantiated by the chronology of the epidemic shown by Clark et al} in their Table 1, i.e. only 10% of the Mexican women 20 to 49 years were obese in 1988.