Picking a bone with the obese in Beijing

The Beijing Physical Examination Center released results earlier this week of health checks from more than two million people in 2010. If you were expecting that the capital's denizens were all super-fit, healthy model specimens, then perhaps you need to seek medical help, too. The results found two main ailments afflicting Beijing residents: chronic obesity and osteoporosis.

Obesity should be expected, as it's a well documented symptom of the city. In his 2010 book Fat China, co-author Paul French outlined how the nation's eating habits - specifically, binge snacking - had been influenced by the wider availability of salted snacks and general fast-food. That can't be helped by the constant, all-encompassing string of food safety scandals that has hit the country, pumping the populace full of chemical-grade, mass-inducing hormones.

China seems to be taking a leaf from the book of Victorian Britain when it comes to the male body type. It can't be a coincidence that in online surveys asking what quality women look for in a man, the prime answer is either a high-rise apartment or a BMW.

Beijing residents just aren't interested in old notions of romance or a decent sex life. Rather, what's important is how much money you have. The fact that you're a grossly overweight, pale, frail, fraught freak of nature is perfectly acceptable, even desirable. It's an indication of your fantastic wealth accumulated from being stuck inside an office or tinted-windowed Audi for 12 hours a day. How dare those tanned peasants working in the field claim otherwise!

On the other hand, osteoporosis is a much bigger problem. It's caused by lack of calcium that, aside from dairy products, is obtained from sesame, greens and vitamin D. The latter is found in sunlight. In order to overcome Chinese people's fear of the sun, it requires not only a complete reworking of the Chinese psyche but also a massive change in the way the city is run.

Between 2009-10, two Beijing residents kept a photo diary of the city's blue sky days, basing their project on when the sky was actually visible on low-pollution days. They found that the capital, in the wake of the 2008 Olympic clear-up, managed to get in about 180 "actual blue sky days" over that year-long period.

Assumedly, people weren't getting their healthy dose of sunshine and vitamin D during the remaining 185 days, even when the weather was nice. Is this the cause of Beijing's osteoporosis scourge? Probably not, but along with the standard issues of sitting in darkened office spaces and taking public transport inside buses or underground on the subway, it's clearly a contributing factor to the problem.

Perhaps locals' vampire-like avoidance of the sun is also a contributing factor. Even on one of the rare blue sky days, the capital's residents prefer to stroll underneath umbrellas or hoods, covered from head-to-toe to avoid an unseemly tan.

I'm not a doctor and as a pale Englishman I'm aware of the risks of another killer - skin cancer. But the lack of vitamin D in Beijing must surely be linked to people's lack of exposure to the sun on days it decides to show its face.

It's an unsurprising (if not unsettling) diagnosis, but as long as women find pasty, obese, wheelchair-bound businessmen attractive, I don't think it's going to be a big problem.