70 pct of Chinese people want to lose weight: white paper

Guangzhou: China has witnessed increasing public awareness of weight control, with 70 percent of its people hoping to lose weight and more than 60 per...

Guangzhou: China has witnessed increasing public awareness of weight control, with 70 percent of its people hoping to lose weight and more than 60 percent willing to spend time and effort on achieving this goal.

This was revealed by a white paper on the health and weight control of Chinese adults, which was made public at an obesity prevention conference held in Foshan, south China's Guangdong Province, on Saturday.

The white paper showed that half of Chinese adults have made self-assessments that do not match their actual body mass index (BMI), while 14 percent who consider themselves to be in the healthy range are overweight in terms of the BMI measurement.

Such inaccuracy in self-assessment makes it tougher to prevent and control cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes and other chronic diseases, indicating an insufficient understanding of obesity's risk to health, according to Liang Xiaofeng, vice chairman of the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association, the organization which authored the white paper.

Currently, 34.3 percent of Chinese adults are overweight and 16.4 percent are obese, according to the National Health Commission. It warned that 70.5 percent of Chinese adults would be overweight or obese by 2030 without steps to control the threat -- which would result in medical expenses amounting to 61 billion US dollars.