Uncle Sam says, "Hell, I don't need armaments superiority to defeat
the ChinkaGooks. Thanks to the goons' addiction to our fatty, greasy
"cuisine," the growing Chinese OBESITY RATE is doing the job!"
=============
"In China, obesity bcomes a problem that’s foreign to survivors of its
great famine"
By Debra Bruno
December 31, 2012
OLDER PEOPLE in China remember the Great Famine of 1958-61, when 15
million to 45 million people died of hunger and related causes.
Today, nearly every street corner in Beijing and many other cities
seems to boast a McDonald’s. There are KFC outlets in almost every
Chinese city, 3,700 in all. Meanwhile, newly minted members of the
Chinese middle class have rushed to buy cars, leaving bicycles that
were once a major source of exercise rusting on the street. Pizza Hut
is considered a fancy date-night restaurant, T.G.I. Friday’s has
several branches in Beijing, and cans of Coca-Cola are sold at every
corner stand.
With fast food and rising affluence, a country only a generation
removed from hunger is getting fat. How fat? According to the World
Health Organization, the percentage of adults who are overweight and
obese rose from rose from 25 percent in 2002 to 38.5 percent in 2010
in a population of 1.37 billion. Urban dwellers account for much of
this. WHO projects that 50 to 57 percent of the Chinese population
will be too heavy by 2015. (By comparison, 69 percent of Americans age
20 and older are overweight or obese.)
There’s a standing joke, notes Lyn Wren, a physician with
International SOS Beijing Clinic, that “Chinese waistlines are growing
faster than the GDP.”
Given how impoverished the country was not long ago and how
impoverished parts of it still are, “having a problem where people are
eating too much — it can seem a little churlish to complain about
that,” says Paul French, the Shanghai-based author of “Fat China: How
Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation.” French and co-author
Matthew Crabbe found that even as recently as five years ago, obesity
wasn’t recognized as a problem by health professionals in China.
The Chinese Health Ministry has said it encourages healthful eating
programs in schools and the construction of more playgrounds to
promote exercise. And the Chinese Center for Disease Control and
Prevention makes vague references to “health promotion” and providing
“scientific guidance for healthy diets,” but nationwide campaigns
about eating healthfully and exercising are not evident.
In fact, pushing the population to lose weight, exercise and cut back
on unhealthful foods seems to strike a discordant note to some inside
the government, French says. “When I talked to government officials,
their argument was: Right now we’re trying to tell them to do and not
do a lot of things,” such as not spitting on the street, not dropping
trash everywhere and not driving “like complete idiots.”
“They know they can only tell people to do some things... before they
get fed up.”
Parental misperceptions
Although the era of famine is long past, many grandparents and parents
still push their children to eat a lot.
Setsuko Hosoda, a family doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital,
says the parents and grandparents she sees are “always worried that
their child is not eating enough.” A 2012 Penn State study of 176
Chinese children ages 6 to 18 found that 72 percent of mothers of
overweight children thought their children were normal or underweight.
Sissi Zhong, a 26-year-old Beijing secretary, recalls that her
grandparents got angry if she left food on her plate when she was a
child. “They said, ‘Do you know, in my time of food shortages, people
didn’t have food, so how can you waste your food?’ ” Zhong says. So
she cleaned her plate even if she was very full.
When her father came home from business trips with boxes of a Chinese
soft drink called Jianlibao, she started to put on weight. Drinking
four and five cans a day made her weight jump to 143 pounds by the
time she was 18. At 5-foot-3, that would put her barely into the
“overweight” category by U.S. standards, but she was miserable,
getting kicked off her school’s dance team for being too fat and being
teased by boys who liked her skinnier pals. Today, Zhong says she
spends many hours at the gym to stay slim.
Obesity has tended to be an issue that grows along with affluence.
Prosperity means bigger paychecks, which can mean more meat, fast
foods and bigger meals. Meanwhile, long hours at desk or factory jobs
instead of agricultural ones mean less physical activity. The obesity
problem is primarily an urban one in a population that is rapidly
urbanizing.
China also has particular problems, French says, that can promote
obesity. A survey he did found that recent scares about contaminated
milk, fruit and vegetables have made consumers feel more safe buying
and eating packaged foods. “It’s perceived to be less tainted,” he
says. “If it’s packaged and done by Nestle, they’re thinking and
hoping that there is not going to be poison” in the food. Yet, the fat
and sugar content of many packaged foods is often much higher than
that of fresh food.
Contradictory impulses are apparent here, much as in the United
States. Chinese editions of Vogue display models who are bone-thin.
When popular singer A-Mei suddenly seemed to gain weight, online
commentators wondered what had happened, until she gave an interview
attributing her extra pounds to a love of high-calorie green teas made
with tapioca balls, coconut jelly and sugar.
At the same time, China seems oddly fascinated by obesity. Two years
ago, a shopping mall in the city of Shenyang held an obesity
competition to celebrate International Women’s Day. Contestants stood
onstage in frilly white wedding dresses.
Surgical solutions
Chinese are turning to surgical solutions for weight loss. Huiqi Yang,
a general surgeon at Beijing United Family Hospital, has just started
offering an operation in which an adjustable band is surgically tied
around the stomach to constrict it, leading patients to eat less.
Chinese doctors have been doing such bariatric surgeries for 15 years,
but Yang says there is growing interest. She said she performed about
100 gastric-band surgeries in recent years at her previous hospital,
in the city of Tianjin.
Meanwhile, as obesity rises so do the ills associated with it.
A recent World Bank report said diabetes, heart disease and
hypertension are among several noncommunicable diseases threatening
China and other countries. The International Diabetes Federation
estimates that there are 92.3 million diabetics in China. No other
country has as many diabetics — not surprising, given that China is
the most populous country in the world — and even China’s outgoing
president, Hu Jintao, is rumored to have diabetes.
[Bruno is a writer based in China.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/in-china-obesity-bcomes-a-problem-thats-foreign-to-survivors-of-its-great-famine/2012/12/28/7e746dc4-4872-11e2-820e-17eefac2f939_story.html