BBC News : China warned of obesity time-bomb

China will have at least 200m obese people within 10 years if current trends continue, the state media say.

They quoted a top medical expert as saying high-fat diets and less active lifestyles in a country with rising incomes were exacerbating the problem.

The expert said trends among children were the most worrying with 10% of them considered obese.

China has already 90m people out of 1.3bn whose weight is more than 20% in excess of the accepted level.
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He said that rapidly improving living standards had led to a fast-food culture in many cities and more Chinese were adopting more sedentary lifestyles that centred around television, computers and cars.

Mr Chen's report said the problem was particularly bad among youths, with the number of the obese children increasing by 8% every year.
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So who said that Orientals were genetically predisposed to be thin ? If most Japanese, and indeed most East Asians are thin nowadays, it may be due to 2 factors : healthy food (in Japan), frugality due to economic conditions (in most other countries). Interestingly, the obesity rate in China is increasing at the same speed as the economy (8% per year).

Chinese food is notoriously fat. With the rise of the Chinese economy, it is only natural that people eat more, work less physically (more office work instead of manual labour) and thus more fat people. What surprises me is that people in Singapore and Hong Kong, who are also Chinese eating mostly Chinese food, do no get fatter. Maybe, like in the US, it is matter of poorer education in Mainland China. People might not eat equilibrated anymore, or become excessive by lack of self-control (often due to a sense of deprivation).

The perenial question is, why are Americans in average so much fatter than Europeans, and why would the Chinese become so much fatter than the Japanese ? Food diversity ? Lifestyle ? I refuse to think it is sport/exercise, as American people are usually much more sport-obssessed than Europeans and Japanese people. Could it just be a psychological difference ? But what do the younger Chinese share in common with the Americans than they do not share with the Japanese ? Quiz time !