Features
Wednesday, 06 January 2010 03:01
Written by JFK Miller

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Once one of the world’s leanest populations, China is fast catching up with the West

China is getting fat. Dreadfully, obscenely, morbidly fat. The return of the god of wealth has brought with it at least two of the deadlies – gluttony and sloth. Obesity is now a major national health issue in China’s large cities.  In Shanghai, the problem is especially acute, particularly among children. The percentage of obese kids in Shanghai is nearly three times the national average. Nationwide, there are now some 70-90 million Chinese who are technically obese and the problem is getting worse. By 2015, there are predicted to be as many as 200 million obese Chinese.

So, what’s to blame? “Obesity is a problem of wealth, not poverty, in China,” says Paul French, whose Shanghai-based research firm Access Asia has just completed a major report on the subject called Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines Will Change a Nation. “It’s what’s called a ‘wealth deficit.’ Although the story overall is good – two generations ago we were concerned about famine, not feast – the country is becoming fatter due to increased choice and affordability.”

French says China’s obesity problem differs markedly from the West. “In the West, obesity has become a problem of the poor,” he says. “In the US and UK, places like McDonald’s have become middle-class no-go zones; it’s really about poor people and their diet. Here in China though, it’s about middle class and wealthy people. So in that sense it’s turned on its head.”

The other big difference with the West is that China’s obesity problem is not a nationwide one. “It’s an urban problem, not a rural one,” says French. “But it’s starting to spread. We’re now seeing obesity rise in tier two, tier three cities.”

French says the main cause of obesity in China is due to increased consumption. “Chinese are drinking more beer, they’re drinking more fizzy drinks, they’re eating more cakes and sweets and pre-packaged foods. The major issue is volume; people are just eating more. More of everything. Beef is in the diet now. There’s a lot more in the diet that wasn’t before. People are eating more of their Chinese diet and more Western food on top of that.”

Is Western food to blame? “You can’t put the blame on Western fast food entirely,” says French. “As in the West, there’s a conflicted body image here. When you’re little, the pang pang [fat] thing is considered cute. So you get spoiled and you become obese. Then you hit your teens and every image you’re looking at is of size zero models. You can’t go from one to the other, except through liposuction, presumably.”

French says that instead of dieting, Chinese people are indeed resorting to liposuction and other drastic measures. “The biggest cosmetic procedure in China isn’t nose jobs or eye jobs or boob jobs, it’s liposuction. Gastric banding, where you put a band on your stomach to make it small, is massive, too. Young kids are having it done. There are very few regulations on gastric banding.”

“It’s all this hyper-pace of life thing. Everyone wants a solution now and they think money can achieve everything. It’s the same problem with diuretics. In China, slimming pills are openly advertised. Most of them are banned in most other countries. They’re what jockeys take. But here, they’re sold over the counter.”

“Sedentary lifestyles are another problem,” says French. “Chinese culture at the moment is that the more sedentary you are the higher your position in society. People don’t really jog here. The idea is to get off a bicycle not on one.”

China’s prosperity-induced waistlines

1982  – Three years after opening up, a partial survey on diet and nutrition finds 7 percent of China is overweight

1992 – A national nutrition survey clocks 15 percent of the country as overweight – double the figure of a decade ago. Some 30 million Chinese are now clinically obese.

2002 – China Academy of Medical Science conducts the most comprehensive national diet study to date, surveying 270,000 people countrywide. Some 22.8 percent of Chinese adults are found to be overweight (200 million people) while 7.1 percent are clinically obese (60 million). Within a decade the prevalence of being overweight has increased by 39 percent and obesity by 97 percent.

2005 – Xinhua reports that between 70-90 million Chinese are now clinically obese – one third of the total number of obese people worldwide. Between 6-10 million adult Chinese become obese each year.

2015 – Predictions indicate that as many as 200 million Chinese will be morbidly obese within five years. China’s heavyweights still lag behind the US, where two out of three people are overweight or obese, but China is on course to be exactly like the US in 10 or 20 years.

//  Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines Will Change a Nation will be published in July 2010 by Anthem Press

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