More than half of Chinese adults are now considered overweight, a study by the country’s National Health Commission found. Obesity among Chinese adults has also more than doubled in less than two decades, from 7.1% in 2002 to 16.4% this year.
According to the report, 50.7% of Chinese adults are overweight, including those who are obese. In a country of 1.4 billion people, that equates to more than half a billion people – more than the entire American population.
That is a sharp increase in the past two decades. In 2002, 29.9% of Chinese adults were overweight, including obese. In 2012, that figure rose to 42%, according to previous reports from Chinese health authorities.
“The residents of our country face a serious problem of overweight and obesity. The rates of overweight and obesity among residents of both urban and rural areas and of all age groups are steadily increasing,” said Li Bin, deputy director of the National Health Commission. press conference on Wednesday.
It is partly due to massive changes in diet and eating habits as a result of the country’s rapid economic growth. During the 1950s and 1960s, an estimated 45 million Chinese were starved of starvation. And until 1993, people had to use government-issued food stamps to get staples like rice, oil, eggs, and meat.
The days of food shortages are long gone. Now, the Chinese are free to eat largely as they please, and the country’s newfound wealth has brought increasingly nutritious and high-calorie foods to the dining table.
The increase in purchasing power has also led to the problem of food waste, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has called “shocking and disturbing”. On Tuesday, a bill to prevent food waste was submitted to the country’s national legislature.
The rising percentages of overweight and obesity are an additional burden on public health. Being overweight increases the risk of serious illness and health problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary artery disease and stroke, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The overweight and obesity rate in China has been rising rapidly, with a high prevalence and affecting all populations. This poses enormous challenges,” said Zhao Wenhua, chief nutritionist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the World Health Organization, at least 4 million people die every year from being overweight or obese.
Globally, obesity is also on the rise, nearly tripling since 1975, according to WHO. In 2016, 39% of adults worldwide – or more than 1.9 billion people – were overweight, including more than 650 million obese.
In the United States, 71.6% of adults were classified as overweight, including obese, between 2015 and 2016, according to the CDC.
But China has a stricter benchmark than global standards. The WHO considers a body mass index (BMI) – a ratio of weight to height – of more than 25 as overweight and more than 30 as obese. In China, a BMI of more than 24 is considered overweight and more than 28 is obese.
