China now has the largest overweight population of any country in the world. (Photo: Li Hao/GT)
It's official: for the first time in human history, there are more obese than underweight people in the world, according to a new study published by the Lancet Medical Journal last week.
The study estimates that 10.8 percent of men and 14.9 percent of women worldwide are obese, which is defined as having a BMI (body mass index) of over 30, while just 8.8 percent of men and 9.7 percent of women are underweight, which is defined as a BMI of under 18.5.
The study pooled data from adults in 186 countries and found that the number of obese people had shot up from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014.
While obesity is clearly becoming a problem everywhere, the news was especially bad for China - this year it replaced the U.S. as the country with the greatest number of obese people in the world, rising from its number-two ranking in 2014. The numbers are staggering; according to the report, China is home to 43,200,000 obese men and 46,400,000 obese women, accounting for 16.3 percent and 12.4 percent of obese men and women around the world.
"There will be health consequences of magnitudes that we do not know," professor Majid Ezzati, lead author of the study, told AFP.
"Obesity and especially severe and morbid obesity, affect many organs and physiological processes," he said. "We can deal with some of these, like higher cholesterol or blood pressure, through medicines. But for many others, including diabetes, we don't have effective treatment."
The explosion in China's obesity rates
While it's easy to blame China's new status as the "fattest country on Earth" on the fact that it has a higher population, the truth remains that obesity has been a growing problem in the country for years, as the conveniences of modern life - fast food, cars - and the effects of greater prosperity - sedentary office jobs - have installed themselves in Chinese cities. It's a shift that, according to Feng Lei, co-founder of Dianfeng Weightloss Center in Shanghai, China's urban lifestyle hasn't yet caught up with.
"Most Chinese dishes feature high amounts of oil and salt, and Chinese people still like to eat packaged food or fast food, which can cause the body to secrete less insulin, and result in weight gain," Feng said. "Also, most Chinese people, especially those from smaller cities, haven't formed regular workout habits."
But it isn't just the uneducated who are affected by the recent obesity epidemic - 40-year-old Mao Yu (pseudonym), who works as a doctor in Beijing, says she has been overweight since she gave birth to her first daughter around 15 years ago. "I think it's because between work and taking care of my family, I barely have any time to care about what I eat, let alone work out," Mao told Metropolitan.
Over those years, Mao established a number of bad habits, including skipping breakfast in the mornings and eating whatever she could find at the hospital canteen or convenience store for lunch.
Mao isn't alone in her on-the-go eating habits. According to a report from the Oriental Outlook magazine in February 2013, a market analysis by IKEA found that Chinese consumers are less interested in kitchen supplies because most of them don't cook. According to IKEA's survey, only 5 percent of female white-collar workers in Shanghai cook for themselves after work.
The Oriental Outlook report also quoted a survey by dianping.com, a Chinese review site similar to Yelp, which found that among its groupon deals, the best-selling items were high-calorie foods like cakes or hotpot.
Alarmingly, the rise of high-calorie foods has been accompanied by a decline in physical activity among Chinese people. The Oriental Outlook report quoted Shi Xiaoming, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as saying that according to their statistics, Chinese people in 2007 spent an average of 3.8 hours sitting still every day, while in 2010, that number rose to 4.8 hours.
Of course, the conditions in big cities like Beijing aren't always conducive to squeezing in a workout. "Sometimes I think about going out for a walk, but the air quality is not so good, and there are cars everywhere in the neighborhood, so I just stay in," Mao said.
While reports on China's obesity epidemic have largely focused on big cities, Feng says that the problem is increasingly spreading to smaller cities and the countryside. "For the past two years, we have seen an average 20 percent increase in our number of customers from small cities and even the countryside wanting to lose weight."
Another worrisome development is the growth of obesity among China' teenagers. According to the Economic Information Daily in August 2012, statistics from International Association for the Study of Obesity, which is headquartered in the UK, showed that obesity rate among Chinese teenagers was 12 percent in 2012. One-third of Chinese children under the age of 17 were found to have tested positive for risk factors such as inflammation that could lead to heart disease, and 1.9 percent of children between the ages of 12 and 18 were found to have diabetes, as compared with around 0.5 percent of American children in the same age bracket.
