About 18 Million Chinese Are Obese

Fast-growing China is facing an obesity epidemic with about 18 million people obese and 137 million overweight, researchers said on Friday.

Although the problem is less severe than in the United States, it poses a major public health problem for leaders of the world’s most populous nation.Another 64 million of China’s 1.3 billion people suffer from a condition call metabolic syndrome which raises their risk of heart disease and other illnesses.”These findings emphasize the urgent need to develop national strategies for the prevention, detection and treatment of overweight and the metabolic syndrome,” said Professor Jiang He, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in Louisiana.Metabolic syndrome, also known as Syndrome X, is a collection of health risks that increases the odds of a person developing heart disease, stroke and diabetes.The symptoms include a large waistline, or beer belly, high blood pressure, raised insulin levels, excess body weight and abnormal cholesterol levels. If someone has three or more symptoms they have the syndrome.Obesity and metabolic syndrome are major risk factors for cardiovascular disease, which is already a leading cause of death in China.”Our results indicate that a large proportion of Chinese adults have the metabolic syndrome and that overweight has become an important public health problem in China,” He said in a report in The Lancet medical journal.The researchers studied 16,000 randomly selected people in China aged 35-74 who completed health surveys and had a physical examination.They found that the prevalence of people who were overweight and who had the metabolic syndrome was higher in northern than in southern China and in urban rather than rural residents.”Economic development and consequential changes in lifestyle and diet might explain this high and increasing prevalence,” said He.Health experts have described the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes as one of the world biggest medical problems. Obesity is measured by body mass index (BMI), calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in meters squared. A BMI of more than 30 is considered obese. More than 35 is severely obese.(Source: Reuters Health, April 2005)