Outside In | Burn more calories than you consume to get rid of that big fat problem
With 120 million people obese and 600 million people classified as overweight, China has an estimated 130 million diabetics, 30 per cent of the world’s total.
With 30,000 dieting books worldwide and a multibillion dollar dieting industry underpinning them, you would have thought we have obesity under control. On the contrary, the obesity crisis is running rampant, and nowhere worse than Hong Kong and China.
“We face an unprecedented epidemic of obesity and chronic ill-health, with no obvious end in sight,” says Tim Spector, Professor at Kings College London and author of The Diet Myth.
Susan Roberts, senior scientist at the Tuft University’s Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the Human Nutrition Research Centre on Ageing, is even more blunt – and specific: Obesity is “one of the greatest health challenges facing humanity.”
She says 600 million people – about 13 per cent of all adults – are obese. That’s double the number in 1980. And the crisis pays no regard to wealth or poverty. Mexico is the “world champion” for obesity levels, just ahead of the UK. And in Malaysia, approximately half of the population suffer from diabetes. In China and India, obesity levels have tripled in three decades.
While the US has for many decades held the dubious title of the world’s most overweight nation – and on current trends will see half the population overweight, or obese, by 2030 - that mantle as world leader has recently been wrenched from it.
Rising wealth, an explosion in fast food, and declining exercise, mean that China is now home to the world’s largest population of obese people – around 120 million – with around 600 million overweight.