Then & now: hitting the big time
Affluence, changing diets and the one-child policy have put China on the road to a Western-style obesity epidemic, writes Jason Wordie
A sight that assaults visitors to certain parts of the Western world - the United States, Britain and Australia in particular - is widespread obesity. Fatness - let's call it what it is - is an epidemic.
Hong Kong, however, has remarkably few corpulent individuals. But the number of overweight people, both here and on the mainland, is rising due to increased affluence and rapidly changing dietary habits.
At one time, brightly coloured advertisements for medicines and infant formula featured Chinese babies that were - by modern standards - very fat. In a country where catastrophic famine occurred regularly, images of plenty were what everyone wanted to see. Who wanted scrawny offspring if they could have "healthy", porky ones instead?
But times have changed. Seriously overweight children can be seen all over the mainland. Part of the problem, it has been alleged, is the one-child policy, introduced in 1979. As with most forms of well-intentioned social engineering, the Frankenstein's monster effect was not anticipated, and the programme has spawned a generation of selfish, overindulged "little emperors".
In Hong Kong, the battle against the bulge has resulted in numerous so-called solutions. Loose consumer-protection regulation means advertisers can tout dubious benefits of products and services. We've seen advertisements for body-toning salons where - for a price - one can be plugged into a variety of electrical gadgets, lay on a couch and - with no further effort - get a rippling six pack in weeks. Yeah, right.