http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Lifestyle/2011/Sep-02/147678-new-beijing-fat-camp-sees-chinese-of-all-ages-battling-the-bulge.ashx#axzz1WlsjO5VW
New Beijing fat camp sees Chinese of all ages battling the bulge
September 02, 2011 02:04 AM
By Sui-Lee Wee, Sabrina Mao
 |
BEIJING: On the grounds of the Bodyworks weight loss campus in Beijing, 30 tubby men and women sweat profusely, gasping for air as they pound the treadmills in an exercise room.
They represent a shocking new statistic in the world’s most populous country. According to estimates, a third of China’s population – some 429 million are overweight or obese, prime candidates for heart disease and diabetes.
It is growing fatter faster than any developing nation except Mexico, with grave implications for the work force and economic growth in the world’s second biggest economy.
At the Bodyworks campus, they range in age from 7 to 55 and come from across China. Each pays 30,000 yuan ($4,696) for the six-week program.
“For the first two to three weeks, it was especially hard. I cried on the phone to my parents and told my father, ‘I can’t make it,’” said Zhang Fang, a 28-year-old employee with China Unicom from northern Shanxi province.
“My mom said: ‘If you don’t continue, you’re done. You need your health.’”
When Zhang joined the camp, she weighed 150 kg, had high blood pressure and had trouble breathing when she walked. She’s lost 50 kg in one year.
Though most Chinese think a chubby child is a healthy child, society can be less tolerant of overweight adults, who complain over not finding jobs.
“I want to give people a good impression when I go for interviews,” said Zheng Xiaojie, a 22-year-old university student from far-western Xinjiang, who has lost over 5 kg in seven weeks. “People feel more comfortable about thinner people.”
Obesity is most acute in China’s biggest urban cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where people enjoy higher incomes, eat richer foods and lead more sedentary lifestyles.
“Urban China got richer. It’s just gone out and bought itself more food and bought itself cars and couches to sit on while watching TV,” Paul French, co-author ‘Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation,’ told Reuters.
Mu Ge, the sales manager at Bodyworks, said the most glaring difference between China and other countries “is that the rich people in China are all extremely fat … [whereas] in other countries, the wealthy are all very thin and beautiful.”
“In the U.K., only the poor people will eat junk food, and will therefore be fat,” Mu said. “In China, it’s the opposite. The more money you have, the fatter you are. It’s almost as if it’s proof that living standards have improved.”
Ding Zongyi, a professor at the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, who has been studying obesity in China for the past 30 years, said the obesity rate has jumped 158 percent since 1996 to 2006 and is set to rise further.
Even the most conservative assumptions have the rate of change in overweight and obesity in China doubling over the next two decades, Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, wrote in the July/August 2008 issue of the journal Health Affairs.
Health experts say that the speed with which China is putting on weight is alarming.
“In America and Europe, they had to go through the whole process of inventing supermarkets and processed food,” French, the writer, said. “It took stages in the West. The Chinese didn’t have to invent the Mars bar. It was given McDonald’s, KFC and Wal-Mart.”
Popkin said in emailed comments that more fried food, consumption of food from animal sources, sugared drinks and too few vegetables have contributed to China’s expanding girth.
Although the prevalence of fast food is a major culprit, extra-high amounts of salt, sugar and oil in Chinese cooking is another factor contributing to the sharp rise in obesity.
In China, the economic costs of obesity are huge, Popkin said. An increasingly obese population poses economic problems in terms of treatment costs, paid sick leave, loss of productivity, disability and premature death.
The indirect effect of obesity and obesity-related dietary and physical activity patterns was 3.58 percent of GDP in 2000 and was projected to reach 8.73 percent in 2025, Popkin wrote.
Ding said no action is ever taken by the government to address the problem.
They represent a shocking new statistic in the world’s most populous country. According to estimates, a third of China’s population – some 429 million are overweight or obese, prime candidates for heart disease and diabetes.
It is growing fatter faster than any developing nation except Mexico, with grave implications for the work force and economic growth in the world’s second biggest economy.
At the Bodyworks campus, they range in age from 7 to 55 and come from across China. Each pays 30,000 yuan ($4,696) for the six-week program.
“For the first two to three weeks, it was especially hard. I cried on the phone to my parents and told my father, ‘I can’t make it,’” said Zhang Fang, a 28-year-old employee with China Unicom from northern Shanxi province.
“My mom said: ‘If you don’t continue, you’re done. You need your health.’”
When Zhang joined the camp, she weighed 150 kg, had high blood pressure and had trouble breathing when she walked. She’s lost 50 kg in one year.
Though most Chinese think a chubby child is a healthy child, society can be less tolerant of overweight adults, who complain over not finding jobs.
“I want to give people a good impression when I go for interviews,” said Zheng Xiaojie, a 22-year-old university student from far-western Xinjiang, who has lost over 5 kg in seven weeks. “People feel more comfortable about thinner people.”
Obesity is most acute in China’s biggest urban cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where people enjoy higher incomes, eat richer foods and lead more sedentary lifestyles.
“Urban China got richer. It’s just gone out and bought itself more food and bought itself cars and couches to sit on while watching TV,” Paul French, co-author ‘Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation,’ told Reuters.
Mu Ge, the sales manager at Bodyworks, said the most glaring difference between China and other countries “is that the rich people in China are all extremely fat … [whereas] in other countries, the wealthy are all very thin and beautiful.”
“In the U.K., only the poor people will eat junk food, and will therefore be fat,” Mu said. “In China, it’s the opposite. The more money you have, the fatter you are. It’s almost as if it’s proof that living standards have improved.”
Ding Zongyi, a professor at the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, who has been studying obesity in China for the past 30 years, said the obesity rate has jumped 158 percent since 1996 to 2006 and is set to rise further.
Even the most conservative assumptions have the rate of change in overweight and obesity in China doubling over the next two decades, Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, wrote in the July/August 2008 issue of the journal Health Affairs.
Health experts say that the speed with which China is putting on weight is alarming.
“In America and Europe, they had to go through the whole process of inventing supermarkets and processed food,” French, the writer, said. “It took stages in the West. The Chinese didn’t have to invent the Mars bar. It was given McDonald’s, KFC and Wal-Mart.”
Popkin said in emailed comments that more fried food, consumption of food from animal sources, sugared drinks and too few vegetables have contributed to China’s expanding girth.
Although the prevalence of fast food is a major culprit, extra-high amounts of salt, sugar and oil in Chinese cooking is another factor contributing to the sharp rise in obesity.
In China, the economic costs of obesity are huge, Popkin said. An increasingly obese population poses economic problems in terms of treatment costs, paid sick leave, loss of productivity, disability and premature death.
The indirect effect of obesity and obesity-related dietary and physical activity patterns was 3.58 percent of GDP in 2000 and was projected to reach 8.73 percent in 2025, Popkin wrote.
Ding said no action is ever taken by the government to address the problem.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Lifestyle/2011/Sep-02/147678-new-beijing-fat-camp-sees-chinese-of-all-ages-battling-the-bulge.ashx#ixzz1Wlv1HWzj
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Discussion Questions:
1. Globalization is usually viewed as a positive process, but the spread of American fast food chains is certainly negative and has affected, among other countries, Mexico and China. Would you blame the large number of obese Chinese (now 1.5 times the entire United States population) entirely on the "Americanization of China" and are there ANY potential benefits to a more Westernized diet?
2. As nations like China become more developed, especially in their urban centers, and acquire more multinational food companies, what could be done to prevent the invasion of the fast food system that can so radically change the diet and cripple the health of millions of people?
1. I don't know if the obesity problem in China can be entirely blamed on the Americanization of China, but this Americanization clearly has had a negative influence. It was interesting when the article pointed out that one of the main reasons that the obesity levels have increased so quickly is because, unlike in the West, China did not get this 'bad food' in stages, they were exposed to it quickly and all at once. I think that this introduction of fast food chains and sugary American foods is part of the reason (or maybe the catalyst) for why this obesity epidemic has occurred, but with globalization there is always some give and take between countries. I'm not saying that this is a good thing, it just can't be avoided and can't be blamed entirely on one of the countries involved.
ReplyDelete2. I honsetly don't think that the introduction of multinational food companies can be stopped. That would be like trying to stop globalization, which is next to impossible with how interconnected the world is nowadays. And I don't know what can be done to stop this stark increase in obesity in China. It seems like China is now facing the same problem that American is facing, obesity rates are rising, but no one knows how to fix it. One plus of this unavoidable globalization is that when one country finds a practical way to fight rising obesity levels, they will be able to share it with the other country.
1. I agree with Laura. I think that Americanization cannot be blamed entirely to blame for China's obesity problem. However, I think these companies have played a large role. For centuries, the Chinese have lived on diets that are specific to their region. There wasn't all these processed foods and additives. Now with all these new imports it seems that it has become almost fashionable to eat these terrible Western style meals (ie: fast foods, but there are some healthy Western foods!) that the wealthy want to show off how Westernized they are.
ReplyDelete2. I don't think there is anything that could be done to prevent the invasion of fast food. I'm not sure how true this is, but maybe the Chinese government hasn't tried to do anything because the success of these business benefits them because these businesses are investing in their economy. If this is true, the government would then in fact encourage the companies to invest.
1) As the two previous posters stated, Americanization is not the only problem with obesity, but they have contributed greatly to the apparent epidemic. I found it intriguing that the more wealthy population in China had more cases of obesity in comparison to their wealthy American counterparts in relation to the respective poor communities. This actually reminds me of the novel The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. A Chinese farmer constantly looks after his father, wife, and children while tending his crops and getting his family to help him. He stays with his land through many trials and passes it down to his children. They plan to sell it when he is unaware to use the money for their own gain. Opium addictions are also present throughout the novel and the sons may very well fall into that. This article reminds me of the selling out of a culture to a drug that is appealing and addicting.
ReplyDeleteI guess a possible benefit could be adding variety to the cuisine, but the new variety may teach them more of what not to eat than what to eat.
2) Yeah I agree with the above posters that it would be incredibly hard if not impossible to stop the emergence of fast food in China. As far as other developing nations go that may be thinking about incorporating fast food into their culture, we could show them the statistics of American and Chinese obesity rates pre and post fast food. But why would America do that? America wants their money.