Fat's Beijing: City Fights Back Against Childhood Obesity

Troubled by the rapid rise in youth obesity, Beijing’s municipal health bureau is planning to implement a newly-drafted five-year health plan in some 80% of the city’s primary and secondary schools. Schools are now required to maintain a health file for at-risk students compiling the results of regular check-ups with the school nurse.

This worrying health trend, however, will only worsen if – as studies suggest – that fatter pockets are the main culprit behind bigger waistlines. A recent study in the American Journal of Health Behavior suggests that youth obesity is more common in households with higher incomes and advanced education levels. Mark how Chinese children regularly eat a larger variety of vegetables and fruits than their counterparts in the West yet still pile on the extra kilos that push them into the overweight or even obese category. This peculiarity is borne out in a 2008 paper by Dr. Barry M. Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina and author of The World Is Fat, which blames the rise in obesity on the striking increase in energy-dense diets and fat intake (made possible by the availability of cheap, plentiful oils and animal-source foods); meanwhile, Westernization of eating patterns, along with consumption of fast food and sugar, are not nearly as culpable for China’s weight problem as most of us might assume. (Not yet, anyway.)

Since the municipal health bureau last checked two years ago, a fifth of the city’s primary and secondary school students are now obese. Break that number down by gender, though, and you’ll find that 24.4% of boys in this age group are obese, as compared with 15.8% of the girls. Though it’s nearly impossible to tease out the influence of the social taboo against female obesity, the figures don’t lie – there are more chubby boys than girls in Beijing.

So how do the aforementioned obesity intervention policies intend to help overweight students control their weight? By expanding nutritious lunch plans and instituting a one-hour daily exercise regimen. (Other benefits in the five-year health plan, presumably unrelated to fighting obesity, include free annual dental appointments for students and daily eye exercises.) The plan also mandates nutrition education for school food-workers, teachers and parents.

Studies have shown that obesity not only renders children susceptible to a host of adult diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes, but is also linked to early sexual development in girls. Our guess is that if anything is likely to get overindulgent Chinese parents to take their child’s weight problem seriously, it’s the fear that their children’s studies might get derailed by zaolian (早恋), or teenage love affairs.

Photo: MemeGenerator