Statistics show that the proportion of overweight adults in China has climbed to 15 percent from merely 9 percent a decade ago. The numbers of people suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes have reached 110 million and 30 million, respectively.

Medical professor Zhang Yina of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province explained that with the improved standard of living, more people prefer a daily diet high in animal fat, sugar and salt instead of simple food that is rich in vitamins and minerals.

An unhealthy diet, little exercise, and irregular working and sleeping hours as a result of increasingly fierce working competition are closely connected to a series of heart and blood diseases, diabetes, osteoporosis, gout and cancer.

(Xinhua News Agency November 12, 2001)