China: The new fast food nation?

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China shares global obesity problem

From AP

11jul04

 

SHANGHAI: For Chinese raised in an era of food rationing, with

memories of days of grumbling, empty bellies, long food lines and

dusty piles of winter cabbage, buying groceries these days is truly

like being a kid in a candy shop.

 

Shelves burst with choices - crackers, cookies, chocolates, chips.

Tubs of dried fruit, jelly and pudding line crowded aisles.

Traditional pastries packed with lard, egg yolks and bean paste are

no longer once-a-year treats but handy snacks.

Small wonder that tens of millions of Chinese - members of a culture

so food-focused that " Have you eaten yet? " is one way of saying

hello - have joined the global epidemic of obesity that has left one

in four human beings overweight.

 

" It was a matter of fulfilling my every wish, " says Jia Yihe, a hefty

23-year-old northern Chinese, citing an old saying to explain the

reason for the weight gain that prompted his family to send him south

to enroll in a Shanghai weight-loss clinic.

 

" It also had a lot to do with KFC and McDonald's, " he admits.

 

Although fast foods are one culprit, a universal fattening of the

global food trade is seen by many experts as a key cause for the mass

abandonment of traditional, low-cost diets rich in fiber and grain

for those higher in sugar, oil and animal fats.

 

Obesity rates have soared as China shifts from staple foods to

culinary abundance and from grueling physical labor to more sedentary

work - a process accelerated by the rush to modernize after decades

of communist-led austerity under Mao.

 

" In China, we've seen that as people have a little bit of money to

spend, it's easy for them to add much more oil and meat to their

diet. Instead of steamed rice, they'll have fried rice, " says Brian

Halweil, a researcher at the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute

who has studied the impact of the globalising world food business on

public health.

 

" Those changes alone add up, " Halweil says.

 

The small farms that traditionally supply open-air markets are

yielding to vast agribusiness conglomerates that feed ever-larger

supermarket chains. It's a trend throughout developing countries,

including China.

 

China still imports less than 5 per cent of the groceries that show

up on its dinner tables each night, but you'd never guess that by

looking at the dizzying array of Western and Asian-style snack foods

crammed into every supermarket and convenience store.

 

A traditional supplier of support to China's inefficient and land-

starved farmers, the government began subsidising food-processing and

packaging companies a decade ago, hoping to improve quality and boost

competitiveness. Since then, the variety of Made-in-China processed

foods has expanded vastly, as have Chinese waistlines.

 

Many are products licensed by foreign food conglomerates to local

manufacturers, using ingredients grown in China - frequently with an

extra measure of sugar, even in supposedly salty snacks.

 

Often less heavy in fat than US-made products, they tend to be priced

to suit family budgets.

 

The Nonggongshang No.101 grocery store, which translates as " Farm,

Industry, Business, " is - like hundreds of other Shanghai

supermarkets - a feast for the eyes.

 

There are shelves of plainly packaged traditional staples like dried

tree fungus, vermicelli and seaweed. But most aisles explode with the

bright reds, yellows and blues of packages of crispy, salty and sweet

snack foods: Wang Wang rice crackers, Lay's potato chips - and 101

flavors of instant noodles, from curry to roast chicken.

 

" Leisure-time foods like cookies and potato chips are the most

popular food in our stores, " says Liang Jianfang, a business manager

at a rival Shanghai supermarket chain, the Hualian Group. She

acknowledges that the most-coveted foods are the least healthy.

 

The stores can't afford to reject unhealthy products if customers

want them, she said, " But I do remind my daughter not to overeat

fried chicken, for the sake of her health. "

 

For several decades after the 1949 communist revolution, shopping

usually involved lining up outside state-run stores. Families relied

on ration coupons provided by their state-run work units for grain,

oil, sugar and other necessities. There were no Western-style

convenience stores or supermarkets.

 

Many older Chinese recall the hunger and desperation of China's last

major famine, when as many 40 million people starved to death after

Mao's Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s.

 

Today, pockets of hunger exist among China's poorest, who still

number in the tens of millions. But most young urban Chinese have

never gone hungry.

 

Convenience stores like 7-Eleven compete side-by-side. KFC and

McDonald's both have hundreds of restaurants in hundreds of cities.

 

Hothouse farming supplies strawberries, melons and tomatoes year-

round. In winter, peddlers outside Beijing subway stations hawk

mangosteens, a tropical fruit unseen in years past. Sidewalk piles of

winter cabbage, the traditional seasonal staple, have virtually

disappeared.

 

When Jia was born in the early 1980s, his country was embarking on an

unprecedented era of affluence. Since then, Chinese have more than

tripled their per-capita consumption of edible oil and meat and

doubled the amount of sugar they eat. Consumption of eggs and liquor

has soared by more than six times.

 

Even tiny neighborhood diners dish up lavish meals of deep-fried meat

in sticky-sweet or spicy gravy.

 

" Twenty or 30 years ago, average meals were much less greasy partly

because oil was rationed. Now people are unknowingly taking in more

calories per meal, " says Dr Ray Yip, a nutritional expert at the US

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a longtime Beijing

resident who now runs the CDC's AIDS program there.

 

Mainland Chinese may not have a word for " love handles, " but they've

become all-too-familiar with " pijiu du " (beer bellies) and " spider

guys " - men with big, round bodies and skinny arms and legs.

 

Just a decade ago, only one in 10 Chinese was overweight, with very

few classified as obese.

 

Estimates of the number of overweight Chinese vary. One study by

Tulane University showed that by 2000, just under a third of all

Chinese adults were overweight. In the United States about two-thirds

of the population is too heavy.

 

A separate study by the Shanghai Children's Health Care Institute

found that 8 per cent of children aged 3 to 6 were obese. Parallel

studies by the Tulane research team found a sharp rise in levels of

blood cholesterol and diagnoses of high blood pressure and diabetes

over the past decade, even in children.

 

Despite many Chinese studies documenting the same trends, the

government has yet to take concerted action. In one recent report,

though, it noted that the problems are worst in China's big cities -

home to four of every 10 Chinese - thanks to diets now heavy in high-

calorie foods.

 

For most of the 800 million Chinese still living in the countryside,

though, getting fat is a minor worry, if that.

 

There, less than 5 per cent of the population is overweight. Routine

daily chores - hoeing fields, scrubbing clothes on a washboard,

fetching water or bicycling vegetables to market - are a natural

workout. Malnutrition is not uncommon.

 

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United

Nations, more than 40 per cent of children in China's poorest western

provinces have stunted growth caused by malnutrition.

 

" China still has both the diseases of affluence and the diseases of

the poor, " Yip says.

 

Yet as growing numbers of farmers migrate to the cities, they, too,

are adding pounds (kilograms) as their need for calories declines

just as their access to fattening foods rises.

 

Urban Chinese lifestyles are being transformed from active to

sedentary as people who once rode long distances by bicycle switch to

commuting by subway, car or motorscooter, or give up evening strolls

to stay in air-conditioned apartments and watch TV.

 

" Eating at night, in front of the television, that's the biggest

problem, " says Dr Jiao Donghai, the weight-loss specialist treating

Jia. As he chats, patients and staff barge in and out of his modest

clinic on a quiet Shanghai side street.

 

Jiao treats patients with a combination of his own patent of

traditional Chinese medicine, massage and what he calls

the " fundamentals. "

 

" Eat less and move more - that's the basic rule, " says Jiao,

monitoring the pulse of 37-year-old Zhou Xiaoguang, a petite 37-year-

old who is barely plump.

 

" You see, she regained some weight, so she's back. " Zhou offers the

most obvious explanation for her weight problems - a description in

miniature of what is happening to her country: " It's just so hard not

to eat too much. "

 

AP

 

 

 

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