HUNGARY - The advance of the free market has triggered a decline in the physical and mental health of the average Hungarian. Loss of guaranteed jobs and housing has lead to increases in smoking, drinking and overeating. A World Bank study concluded that many of Hungary's 10.6 million people are now in danger of drinking themselves to death. Hungarian males now have the world's highest cancer rates, the lowest life expectancy in Europe and one in five men is an alcoholic.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kitty McKinsey reports from Budapest that "The trend toward catastrophic bad health and early death is evident in most of the Central and East European countries undergoing the transition to a market economy." Surveying the debilitating aftermath of free-market economics, Britain's The Economist was moved to pose the question: "Is Capitalism Lethal?"
The communist system, while marking "huge strides in controlling infectious diseases," ignored poor lifestyle habits, McKinsey observes. The average Hungarian wolfs down 24 kilograms (53 lbs.) of lard each year.
But while Hungarians are dying, citizens in Poland are thriving - thanks to dietary policies mandated by the government. The Polish government has ended subsidies for meat and imposed a "meat-tax" to persuade people to eat more vegetables. The tax worked: Poles have shifted to vegetable oils, oranges, grapefruit and bananas. "The resulting 15 to 20 percent decline in death from cardiovascular disease is of a magnitude unprecedented in peacetime," Polish health advocate Wiltold Zatonski told McKinsey.
"For the first time in a very big population," Zatonski stated, "we are showing that if you improve your diet with very simple improvements, you are able to cut cardiovascular disease mortality nearly immediately - not in dozens of years, but in one or two years."
Why hasn't this lesson been learned in Hungary? McKinsey quotes one anonymous doctor who recalled being invited to a medical conference "where the appetizer was a piece of lard, and the main course was a heavy pork goulash floating in grease ... Nearly every doctor in attendance smoked, and most of them proceeded to get roaring drunk over the course of the evening."
Lard vs. Leafy Greens