More than a quarter of Chinese adults, or roughly 350m people, are overweight or obese
IN 1926 WALTER MALLORY, a foreign-affairs expert who would go on to head the Council on Foreign Relations, dubbed China the “land of famine”. Nearly a century later, the country is grappling with the opposite problem. ; among children, the proportion is one in five, up from just one in 20 in 1995.Annals of Internal Medicine
, a journal published by the American College of Physicians, one in seven of the country’s adults is obese, defined by Chinese standards as having a body mass index of 28 or more. But obesity rates are even higher in big cities, particularly in the north. A quarter of Beijing’s adults are considered obese; more than a fifth of adults in Tianjin, a nearby port city, similarly have worrying waistlines. Meanwhile in Guangxi, an agricultural province in the south, less than 6% of adults are obese.
China’s government is trying to tackle the problem, though it could do more. Most public-health initiatives—such as “Happy Ten Minutes”, a programme which encourages youngsters to exercise for ten minutes a day—emphasise the importance of physical activity but say little about diet. This may not be an accident.
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