China worries about its bulging waistlines

IN 1926 WALTER MALLORY, a foreign-affairs expert who would go on to head the Council on Foreign Relations, dubbed China the “land of famine”. Nearly a century later, the country is grappling with the opposite problem. More than a quarter of Chinese adults, or roughly 350m people, are overweight or obese; among children, the proportion is one in five, up from just one in 20 in 1995.

China’s fat is not spread evenly, however. According to a new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a journal published by the American College of Physicians, one in seven of the country’s adults is obese, defined by Chinese standards as having a body mass index (BMI) of 28 or more. But obesity rates are even higher in big cities, particularly in the north. A quarter of Beijing’s adults are considered obese; more than a fifth of adults in Tianjin, a nearby port city, similarly have worrying waistlines. Meanwhile in Guangxi, an agricultural province in the south, less than 6% of adults are obese. In Hainan, a tropical island off China’s southern coast, the obesity rate is also under 6%.