Fidel Castro’s long and powerful influence over Cuba produced many well-known geopolitical events, from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Cuban missile crisis. The Castro years also included a unique but little recognized public-health phenomenon. In the early and mid-1990s, the Cuban population became the only modern society to lose significant weight on a national basis.

(ok predpokladam ze aj Severna Korea...)

The obesity rate fell from 12 percent to 7 percent in 1995, and diabetes mortality dropped 13.95 percent per year from 1996 to 2002, a period when obesity rates remained low. During the same time frame, coronary heart disease mortality decreased by 6.48 percent per year.

Castro’s Cuba: A public health phenomenon in the ’90s showed the effects of national weight loss