Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Health change in the Asia-Pacific region: disparate end-points?
- 2 Interactions of nutrition, genetics and infectious disease in the Pacific: implications for prehistoric migrations
- 3 Biocultural adaptation and population connectedness in the Asia-Pacific region
- 4 Changing nutritional health in South East Asia
- 5 Obesity and nutritional health in Hong Kong Chinese people
- 6 Modernization, nutritional adaptability and health in Papua New Guinea Highlanders and Solomon Islanders
- 7 Tongan obesity: causes and consequences
- 8 Nutrition and health in modernizing Samoans: temporal trends and adaptive perspectives
- 9 Health patterns of Pacific Islanders and Asians in the United States
- 10 Impacts of modernization and transnationalism on nutritional health of Cook Islanders
- 11 Mortality decline in the Pacific: economic development and other explanations
- 12 Health changes in Papua New Guinea: from adaptation to double jeopardy?
- Index
- References
10 - Impacts of modernization and transnationalism on nutritional health of Cook Islanders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Health change in the Asia-Pacific region: disparate end-points?
- 2 Interactions of nutrition, genetics and infectious disease in the Pacific: implications for prehistoric migrations
- 3 Biocultural adaptation and population connectedness in the Asia-Pacific region
- 4 Changing nutritional health in South East Asia
- 5 Obesity and nutritional health in Hong Kong Chinese people
- 6 Modernization, nutritional adaptability and health in Papua New Guinea Highlanders and Solomon Islanders
- 7 Tongan obesity: causes and consequences
- 8 Nutrition and health in modernizing Samoans: temporal trends and adaptive perspectives
- 9 Health patterns of Pacific Islanders and Asians in the United States
- 10 Impacts of modernization and transnationalism on nutritional health of Cook Islanders
- 11 Mortality decline in the Pacific: economic development and other explanations
- 12 Health changes in Papua New Guinea: from adaptation to double jeopardy?
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
As elsewhere in the Pacific, the population of the Cook Islands is characterized by the rapid increase of obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes, as well as profound out-migration across the past 40 years or so. Cook Islander migrations to New Zealand, and subsequently Australia, began in the 1950s, but have proceeded at such a rate that Cook Islander migrants now outnumber indigenes on the Cook Islands by about two to one (Ulijaszek 2005). The effects of economic modernization on blood pressure, body fatness and type 2 diabetes have been largely attributed to commonly measured risk factors, including dietary change associated with increased penetration of the world food system, and reduced physical activity associated with increased mechanization of life. Highly palatable and energy-dense foods are available, affordable and widely consumed in the Cook Islands (Ulijaszek 2002), and explanations invoking dietary change (Ulijaszek 2001a, 2002) and reductions in physical activity (Evans and Prior 1969; Ulijaszek 2001b) have been put forward for the high prevalence rates of obesity there.
In this chapter, trends in blood pressure, body size and diabetes status across recent decades are described for adult Cook Islanders living on Rarotonga, the most economically developed of the Cook Islands. Relationships between their blood pressure, body mass index (BMI) and fasting blood glucose are also described. These are then related to their diet, physical activity and different modernization factors in multiple regression models.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Health Change in the Asia-Pacific Region , pp. 219 - 233Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007