I can’t say enough about these BBC World Service radio documentaries. Each one is fascinating, in-depth and articulate. They come from all over the world (the diversity of accents is a nice bonus), covering a breadth of topics that matter–from the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict to homophobia in Jamaica. They’re served up in 22-minute chunks, but usually have multiple parts.
I just listened to the first episode of Globesity. Paul Bakibinga, an overweight Ugandan, visits South Africa to investigate the vexing, exploding problem of obesity in a developing nation:
With 1.6 billion people overweight worldwide, fat is now recognised as a major global health threat – even in the developing world…
According to the World Health Organisation, there are twice as many overweight as the 800 million who are undernourished.
The program is full of interesting facts. One doctor descries South Africa as now facing a fourth epidemic (after violence, third world diseases like Malaria and HIV/AIDS) of obesity. The phenomenon is worst amongst urban, black women, two-thirds of whom are overweight.
It’s a madly complicated problem. Not only is access to nutritional food unreliable, but there are also AIDS-related and ingrained cultural stigmas against appearing thin. Ironically, many of the overweight people are also undernourished because of their poor diet.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I totally agree about BBC World Service documentaries. Your post about the Six Days War podcast pointed me to them, and I have been devouring them ever since.
Thanks for the tip.
You could also see the problem of overweight/poor nutrition with many of Canada’s first nations communities. It’s sad, really.
In Mongolia, obesity was becoming a growing (heh) problem as people moved into the cities and got cars. The traditional herding diet is high in fat, starch, meat and actual chunks of fat. Mongolians moving to the city did not change their diets and were becoming larger and more obese since they were not getting the amount of activity they had in the countryside. Quite interesting, really.
Your post on the BBC made me think of Canada’s international coverage. We don’t have the same level of International journalism opportunities as the Brits or Americans. Is this because we don’t have the population or money to afford these opportunities?
I think people are interested in learning more about global issues- but we simply don’t have the men and women on the ground reporting. This has been frustrating for me, as I’ve been researching more international journalism opportunities and have been feeling rather limited as a Canadian.
The Japanese Fetish docu was interesting 🙂
Reminds me of when I first heard about “food deserts” describing places in the developed world that lack access to nutritious, fresh, culturally appropriate food, as well as the knowledge to tell it apart from, or balance it with, whatever other stuff is around.
Harmen: Yeah, okay, that’s one topic that doesn’t really matter, but it sure was interesting. I spent the whole episode trying to figure out where the reporter was from. It turns out she’s Brazilian.