How Healthy is Germany?
For much of my childhood my family would holiday in the UK, partially because of cost and partially because taking four children further than the Isle of Wight must have given my parents panic attacks. Ensconced in our bright red Austin Maestro, we would chunter around the UK, staying in the vacant homes of friends who had less feral children. With only ourselves and our parents to torment, you would imagine any opportunity to stop and let us out would seem like a godsend. However, my parents had a few rules about what was and wasn’t an acceptable place to stop, most of which involved food. For instance, we were never allowed to stop at the British motorway restaurant chain Happy Eater for the simple reason that it served white bread. We might wail, and invariably we did, but we were a brown bread family. Our diets were firmly regulated for many years, snack food was kept to a minimum and sugar, sensibly, was off limits. This all changed when my parents divorced. Now a single parent family, the impact on what we ate was noticeable. Whether out of guilt or just to keep me and my brothers quiet, white bread suddenly became available, we began to eat more processed food because of time and more often because of cost. As a family, we had less money and less money in the UK usually correlates with a worse diet. It was no surprise that, by age 16, I was tipping the scales at 140kg (22 stone).
This experience has left a lot of mental scars, even today at 37 I rarely stand in front of the mirror without a t-shirt. Although I managed to lose a lot of weight, my mood is still directly connected to weight fluctuation, when I’m too heavy I become depressed, when I lose some I’m momentarily happy but secretly deeply concerned I might put it all back on again. For many years this has been my personal little diet battle, but now we have a daughter, my wife and I will often talk about her diet. We’re in the incredibly lucky position of having enough money to make sure she eats healthy from the beginning, but my own neuroses about food often takes over. I’m already war gaming how and when sugar will be introduced to her. I’m also hyper aware that as a young woman, she will be subjected to insane body image standards from practically all directions. I’m quite determined that my weight obsession isn’t carried over to her, like the shock of red hair that clearly denotes she’s a Houghton.
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry. After all, we live in Germany, a country known for its active healthy lifestyle. From the smallest two horse town to the largest urban sprawl there is at least one Sportverein (sports club) to be found offering football, tennis or handball. If organised sports aren’t your thing, one of Germany’s favourite pastimes is Die Wanderung (hiking), with much of the German countryside crisscrossed with hiking routes at a variety of different levels of difficulty. If you don’t like any of these options, you could simply join the ever-increasing number of cyclists commuting on German streets.
Employers here are required to pay into the health insurance packages of their employees and so have a vested interest in keeping their employees fit. Many of the companies I’ve worked with, from small family businesses to multinational companies have sports groups either organised by colleagues or paid for by the company itself. The canteens in many of these locations have slowly moved away from the schnitzel and pasta model of decades before, to be replaced with salad bars and a million different variants of cous-cous. In many locations I work, employees will often go for walks after their lunch or in more extreme cases, join jogging groups in their uniform of terrifyingly tight spandex.
Getting enough sport is one thing, but healthy diet is also a major concern for me. Again, perhaps I’m worried about nothing. Germany is not a country of convenience food, that’s not to say it doesn’t exist, but unlike the UK we don’t lionise unhealthy food. There is no equivalent to Pot Noodle in Germany, they have similar products, but they haven’t become a minor national obsession with lurid advertising campaigns celebrating how terrible they are. Nutritional information isn’t colour coded on the front of every package, nor has there been public uproar over plans to introduce a sugar tax. In fact, studies show that there is clear support for such measures in Germany.
It also seems from simple observation that Germans demand higher quality products. Recently there have been debates over factory processed meat, but step into most supermarkets and it’s plain to see just by volume of products what customers want. Processed bread is hidden away at the back of shops, while freshly baked products often sit front and centre at the entrance. Even in the smallest supermarkets there is often a butcher’s counter squeezed in offering alternatives to pre-packaged, low quality meat. The overall quality of fruit and vegetables is also very good, with most products being sourced locally, still caked in mud and often looking like it was just picked that day. This is in stark contrast to my last visit to the UK, where Tesco were selling most of their anaemic looking preprocessed vegetables in sealed plastic packaging.
Despite all these obvious advantages, Germany is still suffering from what some term an ‘obesity epidemic’. Studies by the Robert Koch Institute show that although the proportion of overweight adults has not increased, it remains high. Furthermore, obesity, especially among young people, has continued to rise. Various factors have been identified as a possible cause, from simply getting married (69% of married men are considered overweight) to the profit margins of soft drinks and snacks. The RKI also identifies the socioeconomic factors that lead to poorer diet. As in the UK, the likelihood of becoming obese in Germany is directly connected to your income. The market itself also plays a large role in the increase of obesity. As more supermarkets such as Rewe open smaller convenience stores on German high streets, there is likely to be an increase in the availability of cheap convenience food. As a Deloitte research paper points out, the convenience food market is expected to increase year on year, mostly pushed by companies such as Rewe.
It is common in today’s hyper judgmental world, to lay the blame for obesity squarely at the feet of the individual. I can only speak for myself, but I remember well the days of eating half a loaf of heavily processed white bread or having not quite enough lunch money for something healthy, but more than enough to buy something deep fried and artery clogging. I did that to myself, but I wasn’t alone. Marketing, culture and education all had a hand in my weight gain too. Germany from the outside looks healthy, it acts healthy, but there is something rotten growing inside, hidden away. As the popularity of the sugar tax shows, Germans understand that sometimes the state needs to step-in to counter the rampant nature of the market and in some instances people’s own worst tendencies. Whether Germany is up to the task of reducing obesity rates remains to be seen.
