I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the need for nutrition charlas in the pueblo, but confronting what is probably the biggest problem—sugar consumption through soda and junk food—is almost a cultural insult, considering that every meeting absolutely MUST include refrigerios (in the form of a coke and a cookie)… even the Unidad de Salud (local government health clinic) hands out these unhealthy snacks when they have a meeting, and since that's where I'd be giving the charla, goodness gracious how mixed the message would be.

Which leads me to another thought-- how much El Salvador (and latin america in general) could benefit from the US cutting off it's corn subsidies. The direct economic impact of these subsidies on Latin American farmers is well documented-- the livelihood of farmers here has historically relied on growing corn (as it's a huge part of the diet), so since NAFTA, they’ve been devastated by the drop in corn prices from opening markets to subsidized American corn.
Further, corn subsidies make corn syrup and it’s derivitaves (the sodas and snacks that contribute greatly to obesity) really cheap and readily available, which leads not only to negative health effects, but increased external economic costs to an already strapped society by using limited government funds to pay for obesity related diseases.
If US corn was no longer subsidized, corn prices would rise leading to more money for the farmer and less consumption of the newly expensive corn-syrup based junk food (assuming, of course, that the extra income from the rise in corn prices wouldn’t go towards paying for the newly expensive junk food).