When flying to the US for our summer holiday each year, my family has a foolproof method of locating our check-in queue at Shanghai’s Pudong airport: look for the passengers with the greatest girth. The largest people fly to America.
But according to last week’s Chinese newspapers, we may soon have to find a new strategy (something radical like looking for our flight number on the departures board). Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that China now has a higher percentage of overweight and obese people than the west.
Even more interestingly, Xinhua further asserted that the reason that China has supposedly overtaken the US as the world’s obesity superpower is not the one most of us would imagine. Relax KFC: apparently it’s not your fault for once.