Some 60 million Chinese are obese and some 15 per cent of urban youth are overweight, writes Clifford Coonanin Beijing
It is one of the more visible costs of rampant economic growth. A look around the streets of Beijing or Shanghai shows ever more overweight children and adults - a sign of people switching from China's healthy staples to sugar-charged western food.
China's waistbands are being stretched as the country's economy grows by double-digit percentages every year, translating into poor dietary habits.
While Chinese people tend to be typically slim, busy lifestyles in the New China mean people have less time to exercise and more and more people are doing sedentary office jobs.
City dwellers eat twice as much meat today as they did in the 1980s and people are drinking more alcohol than ever before.
Even though 24 million people still live in abject poverty in the poorer parts of China and suffer from malnutrition, a remarkable 60 million Chinese are now obese, according to nutritional health experts, and some 15 per cent of urban youth are overweight.
Attention-grabbing infectious diseases such as bird flu and Sars have been the main public health issues to dominate in China, but the World Health Organisation warns that more needs to be done to combat the "lifestyle diseases" which already claim more lives every year worldwide than malaria, Aids and tuberculosis.
Statistics show that about 160 million Chinese have high blood pressure and 20 million have diabetes, which is expected to become a major killer in China in the next 10 years.
Pan Beilei, deputy director of the government-affiliated State Food and Nutrition Consultant Committee, told a recent conference in Beijing that unbalanced diets were becoming a problem.
"An increasing number of Chinese are eating more fat and junk food but less grains and vegetables, leading to a high number of cases of high blood pressure and diabetes," Pan told the conference.
Asia has around two-thirds of the world's diabetics, or around 90 million people with the disease, according to the International Obesity Task Force, with the majority of these type two diabetics.
The one-child policy which restricts the number of offspring born to a family has created a lot of spoilt children who gorge themselves on hamburgers, fried chicken and chips - foods unknown to their parents' generation.
Eating in western fast-food restaurants, which are relatively expensive in China, is also a way of letting people know that you have money to spend.
Famines happened in living memory in China and the belief that a fat child is a healthy one is common, leading to more obese children in the schoolyards, which means the problem is particularly acute among the young.
Students' height, weight and chest measurements are going up but lung capacity, speed and strength are going down.
Boys, more treasured than girls, are often those who suffer most from being overweight, as the older generation stuff them with sweets, cake and meat in the hope that a fat boy will later turn into a tall man.
A report in The Lancet in November showed that the proportion of children aged 7-18 years who were obese and overweight increased 28-fold between 1985 and 2000.
One in four boys in China's cities is clinically overweight or obese. The obesity rate of students in the capital last year has risen 50 per cent since 2000.
In many primary schools, where children standing in line are graded according to size with the smallest in front and the biggest at the back, the boys' lines invariably end with a handful of seriously overweight boys. Overweight girls are less common.
In Beijing, more than half of primary schoolchildren were found to have abnormally high blood pressure and more than 60 per cent of secondary school students had the same problem.
There has been a rise in the number of fat farms where obese children are put through military-style training to get them to shed the pounds.
Pan called on the government and academic organisations to give some dietary guidance to citizens.
China's favourite dishes come in small portions and Chinese food is generally seen as a healthy diet - traditionally divided along geographical lines into those who eat wheat-based food like noodles in the north and the rice-eaters of the south, both nutritious sources of healthy carbohydrates.
Fast-food chains are targeting Chinese schools as a growth market, offering to supply meals for children, which means people are opting for oily, fatty foods rather than cooking traditional rice and noodle dishes at home.
The rise of western fast-food restaurants, especially chains such as KFC and McDonald's, means more hydrogenated fats making their way into the Chinese diet.
The change in diet has been striking. The per capita consumption of vegetable oil has increased from around one litre a year to up to 17 litres in the past two decades.
"China has entered the era of obesity," Ji Chengye of the Child and Adolescent Health Section of the China Preventive Medicine Association told the Workers' Daily newspaper. "Childhood is the first age group affected by obesity, to which society has not paid enough attention.
"Obesity in childhood will influence health for life."
Another major factor is the rise in indoor activities - students are spending too much time watching TV, surfing the internet, playing computer games or studying the long hours needed to get ahead in China's competitive education system.
"Their joints are seizing up, their muscles are becoming flabby and their movements are unco-ordinated due to lack of exercise," said Mao Zhenming, a physical education expert at the Beijing Normal University.
Pan says narrowing the growing income gap between rich and poor will help improve the diet of citizens in poverty-stricken areas and make them more healthy.
For the first time, Chinese airlines are having to deal with bigger passengers.
China Eastern Airlines says that this has not been a problem so far, because the company buys its aircraft from Boeing and Airbus, which both have seat sizes built for bigger western passengers. But now it is considering reducing the number of seats on the new Airbus 321 by about 20 to create more room.