Hungary Focuses on Reforming the Nutritional Habits of Its Citizens : Health: The East Bloc country’s problems include high rates of alcoholism, suicide and morbidity.

Victims of the 1956 Revolution may get more press, but poor nutrition has killed more Hungarians than tyrants ever will, say health experts who are growing increasingly alarmed about Magyar eating habits.

Dietary reform is difficult in a country that has long prided itself on a cuisine rich with cream sauces, refined sugar and pork fat. Add to this the fact that lean meats are priced beyond most budgets--one in five Hungarians live below the poverty line--and you get a deadly recipe for widespread cardiovascular disease.

“Hungarian morbidity rates are catastrophic and worsening,” says Peter Makara, a spokesman for the Hungarian Institute for Health Promotion. “Since 1963, the life expectancy of men in Hungary is decreasing, which is absolutely unheard of in a peaceful country.”

The East Bloc has never been a Pritikin paradise of course. But Hungary’s health problems are unique, even among its Warsaw Pact allies: Its alcoholism and suicide rates rank among the world’s highest, and Hungary, along with the Soviet Union, shares the lowest life expectancy of any developed country, according to an April, 1989, World Health Organization report (69.7 years versus 75.5 years in the United States and 79.1 years in Japan.)

Clearly, nutrition wasn’t a priority under the old regime; even former Communist leader Janos Kadar--who died earlier this year--enjoyed his bread drenched in bacon drippings. But today, as Hungary opens up to the West, there is mounting interest in reforming diet as well as politics.

“I sense a distinct change in attitude,” says Dr. Sushma Palmer, who sits on the food and nutrition board of the National Academy of Sciences. She just spent a year helping the government draw up nutritional guidelines and teaching courses for educators and health professionals.

But Palmer, who is also the wife of the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, says that although the government readily acknowledges the problem, it has been slow to act.

Nutrition isn’t taught in school, for instance, so students who know Madonna’s songs by heart can’t recite the four basic food groups. Hungarian produce overflows from supermarket shelves, but Budapest’s salad bars can be counted on one hand. Words like fiber and cholesterol haven’t entered the vernacular.

Makara admits he is sometimes embarrassed when colleagues from the World Health Organization visit him to help plan a European nutrition conference that Hungary is expected to host in 1990.

When dinner time rolls around, Makara says he and his guests must comb the streets of Budapest for newly opened private eateries where fried food isn’t the dominant culinary motif.

“Healthful foods are very difficult to find. . . . In a normal Hungarian restaurant there are no good choices,” says Makara, a portly man of 43 who drops four sugar cubes into each demitasse of espresso.

But there are some portents of change, especially among the more well-to-do and educated classes.

“It’s a new trend among the intelligentsia to invite you to their home and serve a variety of salads,” Makara says.

And of course, restaurants at Western-style hotels offer everything from Cobb salads to grilled chicken breasts. This summer Budapest’s elegant Forum Hotel--a streamlined Western facility perched on the banks of the Danube--began offering a menu of “Hungarian nouvelle cuisine” featuring traditional Hungarian ingredients cooked into upscale offerings. Perch is served in a Champagne sauce instead of a cream-based sauce; hearty squab soup becomes a consomme, and veal medallions are braised and served with zucchini instead of languishing in sour cream.

“We try to make them eat more vegetables and we don’t use fats. For the Hungarian people, this is a new thing,” says Ervin Ungar, manager of the Forum’s swank Silhouettes restaurant, where dinner runs at least $25 per person.

But the average Hungarian factory worker is more likely to visit the moon than blow a month’s wages on a pricey dinner for his family. Besides, in certain circles, such food is considered an insult.

“If you go into a village they don’t offer you salad. It’s an offense. If they want to honor you they bring out some good fatty meat and fatty soup,” says Dr. Sandor Eckhardt, a director of Hungary’s Oncological Institute.

Dr. Sandor Bardach, who teaches at Pesti Barnabi High School in Budapest, which teaches food production, says many of his students remain ignorant of the connection between diet and cardiovascular disease.

“I myself know very well the connection. I have to go to the doctor for cholesterol,” Bardach says. At his school however, “we don’t deal with it in the proper way. It is a problem of the future.”

Hungarian health experts say the recent lifting of travel restrictions to the West will expose more of their countrymen to good nutrition. But they want dietary classes taught in all schools. They want TV commercials that tout the health benefits of boiled lard scrapped. And they want the state to take the initiative.

Instead, competing government programs often sabotage efforts.

Makara, of the state Institute for Health Promotion, complains that his plans for an anti-cholesterol campaign were nixed because another state agency had invested heavily in egg factories and thus wanted Hungarians to eat more, not fewer, eggs.

Ditto with refined sugar. “We are constructing two new sugar processing factories, which absolutely excludes the possibility of an anti-sugar campaign,” Makara says.

Those pushing nutritional perestroika say economics also plays a major role. Many Hungarian jobs involve heavy physical labor, which requires a consumption of many calories. So wives on limited budgets stuff their husbands with bread, lard and potatoes.

“The unhealthy food like fat and carbohydrates are very cheap in our country but vegetables and lean meat are relatively expensive,” Eckhardt says.

And scientists cite a study showing that Hungarian consumption of vegetables and fruit actually declined by 5% between 1960 and 1982, an alarming trend that nutritionists blame partly on rising prices.

Ironically, the Hungarian diet was once rich in leaner meat and fish. In the last century, Hungary was three times as large as it is now and included the forested province of Transylvania, which it was forced to cede to Romania by the Trianon Treaty after World War I. In those days, wild game was popular and plentiful, as were fish caught fresh from the banks of the Danube, Makara says.

No longer. Today, game dishes such as haunch of deer Eszterhazy and roast breast of pheasant prowl mainly on expensive tourist menus.

And the government discourages people from eating fish caught in the Danube, which is now brown from the industrial wastes that are discharged into its currents. The once pristine river is now so polluted that a man who recently drank a glass of Danube water as a publicity stunt was featured for his daring stupidity on the evening news.

But there are signs that Hungary is becoming more aware of organic, health and specialty foods. An organic grocery store on Kristina Korut in the upper-income, residential hills of Buda does a thriving business.

Earlier this fall, between legalizing opposition parties and declaring itself a republic, the Hungarian Parliament approved a national health awareness and disease prevention program.

And the American-Hungarian Friendship Forum, a private, U.S. foundation that Palmer helped found, plans an extensive program to train Hungarian nutritionists in the United States.

Still, the average Andras may look askance at any attempts to exile his favorite dishes to gastronomic Siberia. “I tried to serve my husband salad for dinner,” one Hungarian journalist complained with a sigh. “He got angry with me and said, ‘What is this, rabbit food? Bring me an old-fashioned Hungarian meal like my mother used to make.’ ”