As Global Obesity Rises, Teasing Apart Its Causes Grows Harder

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Asking overweight strangers about their health and eating habits is always going to be tricky for a reporter, but in some contexts it’s easier than others — say, at a program for overweight children, or an obesity clinic, two places that Andrew Jacobs, a reporter with The New York Times’s health desk, visited to report an article about Brazil’s growing obesity rates..

But broaching the subject with Celene Gomes da Silva, who sells Nestlé products door-to-door in poor neighborhoods of Fortaleza and is featured in the article, was a little different; with his translator and researcher, Paula Moura, Mr. Jacobs started by asking about her job. “It felt a little uncomfortable in the beginning,” he said. Then she broke the ice for him. “She kind of acknowledged, ‘Yeah, I’m fat.’ And she kind of laughed about it,” he recalled.

Today’s article is the first in a series being produced by the paper’s health and science desk. The project examines how the processed food, soda and fast food industries’ increasing focus on markets in the developing world — and the accompanying rise in obesity rates and weight-related illnesses — is playing out around the globe.

The idea had long been on the mind of Celia Dugger, The Times’s health and science editor. For several years, she had been filing away news stories and journal articles that touched on what seemed to be a growing trend. “It just seemed stunning to me,” Ms. Dugger said. “It was a huge problem and a fascinating one to try and understand.” Her hunch was confirmed in June, when a new study showed that 10 percent of the world’s population now has a body mass index, or B.M.I., of 30 or higher, the threshold many public health experts say qualifies as obesity.

But it was clear that a story of this scale, driven largely by an economic and cultural transformation of the global food system, couldn’t be understood solely through a scientific lens. Last year, when Ms. Dugger approached The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, with the idea of creating a health reporting “pod” that would bring in reporters with different areas of expertise, the global obesity story was part of her pitch. “This was just the kind of project we would be able to undertake if we had reporters with experience in business and international reporting, as well as in science and medicine,” Ms. Dugger said.

The team took off in January, and Ms. Dugger brought in Mr. Jacobs, a veteran foreign correspondent, and Matt Richtel, a Times reporter with a deep background in both business and science reporting (he won a Pulitzer in 2010 for his Times series on distracted driving). She asked Mr. Richtel to see what he could find. He ended up producing a 10,000-word memo.

Brazil was a good place to start. Companies there have been persuading local farmers to cultivate the soybeans and sugar cane that form the basis of much processed food. Conglomerates like Nestlé have aggressively marketed those products, and over the past decade the percentage of people with obesity has nearly doubled. And, as Mr. Richtel and Mr. Jacobs reported, it’s also a place where economic and political forces have driven the shift.

There were other challenges to telling a story of such scope. For instance, cultural attitudes toward food and weight aren’t uniform, which the team has kept in mind. And explanations of economics and policy can be forbidding, said Hilary Stout, the deputy health and science editor who edited the article. “You have to hold the reader’s attention and get them to see the human aspects of it,” Ms. Stout explained.

Which is where Ms. da Silva comes in. Her economic situation was greatly improved thanks to her job with Nestlé, even as her health and the health of her family have suffered — embodying the complex and surprising interconnections that motivated the broader project. Although those interrelationships won’t look the same in every country in the series, taken as a whole these narratives are meant to illuminate what amounts to no less than a new global food order, and a new health crisis.

“These are huge issues,” Mr. Richtel said, “told close to the ground.”