If you haven’t had the chance yet, pick up Paul French and Matthew Crabbe’s book . It might shock you to learn that China has a growing (forgive the pun) problem with obesity. Why? A lot of the same diet and exercise problems that plague more developed economies are taking root in China. The newly minted middle class of China is eager to enjoy better quality, higher fat content food in greater quantities. All of this is bad enough for Americans whose more developed and sophisticated healthcare system is burdened to cope; what does this all mean for China’s impoverished healthcare infrastructure?
In late December, Kazuhiko Shimizu wrote a piece for Wharton titled “China’s Obesity Problem Reaches Supersize Proportions.” In it, he writes, “China, with its 1.3 billion people, may well soon have more obese people than the U.S., with its population of 311 million. According to the World Health Organization, among Chinese over 15, 45% of males and 32% of females are overweight or obese. Combined, the nearly 40% of overweight Chinese add up to some 500 million people. Among Americans, about 78% are overweight or obese.” In early 2011, the US-China Today (published by the University of South Carolina) put forward the provocative idea that China’s waistlines were “expanding twice as fast as their GDP.” Admittedly, if the relationship applied to all countries and worked inversely, it would have implied a shrinking waistline for many developed economies, but such is not to be the case!
Towards the end of the Wharton article, Kazuhiko notes, “The looming hit to the financial system from rising health care costs could even pose a threat to social stability, given the overburdened and underfunded state of the medical industry, says French. Already, frustrations with the medical system have led to violent attacks on doctors and other hospital staff. But strangely enough, because they have intruded into virtually every area of people’s private lives, particularly their reproductive lives, China’s leaders are loathe to interfere with general health and lifestyle issues, he says. ‘They already control people lives in so many ways that they do not want to tell people what they should buy and what they should consume,’ French says. ‘The government already is doing so many campaigns [such as] patriotic civilization campaigns [and] trying to improve peoples’ driving skills campaigns. If they launched yet another campaign, about being careful of what you eat, people would not follow it.’”
If China with the heavy hand of its government and policy making bodies cannot adequately educate domestic Chinese to change their eating habits, what will? Perhaps one of the many painful adjustments that waits for China is what happens when the mid-term implications of a western diet present themselves in advance of western healthcare designed to treat diseases like diabetes, hypertension and other cardiovascular problems. For now, the benefit of a western diet is obvious; what remains to be seen is whether the western medicine that deals with the problems inherent in this diet can be deployed across China as quickly as the western way eating.
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