MEXICO CITY, Mexico - Modern Mexicans' urban lifestyle, rising incomes and myriad consumption vices have fed a seemingly endless struggle that's killing thousands more of them each year.
Yep, we're talking the desperate Battle of the (body) Bulge.
Even as nearly half its people are poor and as officials launch a national anti-hunger campaign, Mexico by some accounts recently has replaced the United States as the chubbiest of the globe's larger countries.
Diabetes and cardiovascular ills spike, plus sizes cram clothing racks and Mexicans keep eating, eating, eating. While cutting across class lines, the crisis disproportionately hits the poor and the young, malnourishment and obesity stalking them in tandem.
"The same people who are malnourished are the ones who are becoming obese," said physician Abelardo Avila with Mexico's National Nutrition Institute. "In the poor classes we have obese parents and malnourished children. The worst thing is the children are becoming programmed for obesity. It's a very serious epidemic."
About 70 percent of Mexican adults are overweight, a third of them very much so. Childhood obesity tripled in a decade and about a third of teenagers are fat as well. Experts say four of every five of those heavy kids will remain so their entire lives.
Weight-related diabetes claims the most Mexican lives each year, with nearly one of every six Mexican adults suffering from the disease. Heart and related ailments round out the list of the country's top killers.
Diabetes alone kills as many as 70,000 people a year in Mexico - roughly equal to the deaths authorities say are caused by more than six years of the country's gangland wars.
More than 400,000 new cases are being diagnosed every year.
None of this comes as a surprise.
Experts like Avila have been warning about the growing obesity here for years. Local, state and federal officials have tried fighting it with so far ineffective programs. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) two years ago called on Mexico to consider its fattening people a national emergency.
The FAO last month reported Mexico has a 32.8 percent adult obesity rate - just above America's 31.8 percent - blaming increasingly industrialized agricultural production for a worldwide epidemic of both obesity and malnutrition. The Mexican rate may pale beside tiny, heavyweight countries like the Cook Islands, but it ranked Mexico the fattest, populous nation.
Experts argue over the accuracy of such global rankings, but the news made a big splash in the national press and rippled across Latin America's second-most-populous country.
President Enrique Peña Nieto has launched a National Crusade Against Hunger, aimed at alleviating "food insecurity" for some 7.4 million Mexicans. Critics have accused the campaign of being politically motivated with an eye on elections held Sunday in 13 Mexican states. Many of the people targeted live in the more impoverished south of the country, where indigenous rural communities have been especially hit by malnutrition accompanied by cases of obesity.
Avila and other experts criticize longstanding anti-poverty programs for putting cash into rural families' hands that too often is being spent on fried snacks and sodas rather than nutritious foods.
