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China: One Child Policy, rising obesity, Type2 diabetes

This may have been mentioned already, but do rising rates of Type 2 diabetes in China reflect the increase in childhood obesity ("little emperors") that resulted from the "one child policy"?

i.e., If a family only has one child, the family tends to indulge them (as well as having more spending money available per child.)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5261946.stm

China warned over rising obesity
Friday, 18 August 2006
By Jill McGivering, BBC News

People in China are becoming overweight at an alarming rate, a Chinese medical professor has said.

Professor Wu Yangfeng said that in the 15 years between 1985 and 2000, the number of overweight and obese children increased 28-fold.

He made his comments in a special China edition of the British Medical Journal.

The edition also looks at the impact of China's one child policy, the increase in chronic disease caused by smoking and lessons learned from Sars.

Growing problem

China used to be seen as a country with a lean population, but not any more.

Today a fifth of the world's overweight and obese people live in China - and the numbers are rising dramatically....

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gJEGM9P-dlyj7GAuPwiJgu2dlm4w

China's child obesity problem 'ballooning'
(AFP) – May 21, 2008
GENEVA (AFP) — Child obesity is ballooning into a big problem in China as 'little emperors' are increasingly getting an appetite for the Western couch-potato way of life, according to a study presented in Geneva.

Almost one in five children under seven is overweight and more than seven percent are obese, according to a study of the Chinese National Task Force on Childhood Obesity, presented at the sidelines of the annual meeting of the World Health Organisation.

"These numbers are higher than in European countries, while the gross domestic product in China is much lower," said Ding Zongyi, who led the study.

"Only the United States have higher rates," he added...

What tipped the scales were social changes that came along with the [economic] transformation of the country since it opened up economically at the end of the 1970s.

"When a poor person gets richer, the first thing he does is to get better food. That's a big driver of obesity," said Ding.

With large swathes of population in the country still poor and many increasingly getting richer, the problem would not reach its full-blown extent until the years to come, he warned...

The one-child policy which has been implemented in the last 30 years further complicates the issue in a country which considers being fat as a sign of good health and prosperity...

"The one-child policy led parents to overprotect their children. The behaviour of grandparents are of special concern -- they tend to overfeed their grandchildren because they think that being fat is a sign of [a healthy baby and] the family's wealth," said Ding...