Elementary and middle school students get ready for a 10-day training camp to lose weight in Jinan, Shandong province. About 500 participated. Provided To China Daily One in four Chinese children age 7 or above will be obese in 2030, a report issued by Peking University's School of Public Health and other organizations forecasts. The Report on Childhood Obesity in China, released on Thursday, says childhood obesity has been growing at an astonishing rate. It is predicted that the prevalence of overweight and obese students aged 7 to 18 will reach 28 percent in 2030 without intervention. The report, developed from data collected in nine cities, showed that in 2014, 28.2 percent of boys and girls aged 7 to 18 were overweight while 16.4 percent were obese by standards adopted by the United Nations. In the 1980s, childhood obesity was neither an epidemic nor a public health problem. However, from the beginning of the 1990s, it has been growing, said Ma Guansheng, a professor of nutrition at the university's public health school. Childhood obesity has risen to epidemic proportions nationwide, and growth in the number of rural students who are overweight or obese is accelerating, Ma said. While genetics play an important role, the rapid growth of obesity in the last decade was mainly caused by behavioral and environmental factors, including changes in consumption and the food supply, as well as in physical activity, the report said. According to Ma, obesity is also a risk factor for a variety of chronic diseases. The increase in childhood obesity has led to chronic diseases occurring at younger age, she said, adding that excess weight and obesity have become major risk factors for childhood cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. Comprehensive intervention could play a better role in controlling childhood obesity, Ma said. [email protected]custom wristbands no minimum24hourwristbandsjordan wristbandpersonalised rubber bracelets ukcheap silicone wristbands uk202mm to inchessilicone keychainrubber wristbands
Top: Hai Guobao, a resident of Minning village of Yinchuan, the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, recalls President Xi Jinping's visit to his house in July last year. Feng Yongbin / China Daily; Above: Hai's old house and new home, which was built with government help. Provided to China Daily Home, sweet new home. Hai Guobao's memories of his old home revolve around poverty and barely making ends meet. That was why he and his family and 60-plus villagers migrated 300 kilometers from Guyuan, an arid and impoverished mountainous area in the Ningxia Hui autonomus region. Relocation of impoverished populations is one of the measures the government has adopted for its targeted poverty-alleviation program. Under the program, people are advised to move from areas that lack conditions that allow them to make a decent living. However, the residents themselves have to approve the measure. Hai clearly remembers the difficult decision he had to make five years ago. We Chinese farmers see our ancestral home as the root of our family, he said. Leaving home is a final resort. In 1972, Guyuan was recognized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as one of the places most unfit for human habitation on Earth. It was the first area covered by a resettlement program established by the government in the early 1980s. Hai, a village head widely respected by his villagers, was entrusted to go and see what the villagers' new homes would look like. He recalled what he told his neighbors when he returned: If you trust me, you have to listen to me this time. Electricity, tap water, jobs... the government has thought it all out for us. It will be a life from our dreams. Because a great many people helped with the relocation process, Hai had no idea who he should thank specifically until July last year when he received a special guest, President Xi Jinping. It was Xi who kick-started the construction of Hai's new village 20 years ago. Another unique measure the government uses to fight poverty is a program called East-West Pairing-off Cooperation for Poverty Reduction, whereby a developed province in the east assists a less-developed region in the west. As a provincial leader in the eastern province of Fujian, which was paired with Ningxia, Xi was shocked to see the plight of local farmers, and proposed building a new village called Minning (Fujian-Ningxia) village. The past 20 years have seen the resident's per capita incomes rise 20-fold. It's little wonder that Xi, who has strong feelings about poverty relief, proposed the ambitious goal of lifting every impoverished person out of poverty by 2020, meaning 10 million people being freed from scarcity every year. Hai said he thanked President Xi for his help, and later put a large photo of Xi with his family in the most prominent place in the living room. Asked whether he misses his old home, Hai conceded that he did, and said the family visits their old home once a year. There, the infertile farmland has been planted with trees, and the mountains are gradually becoming greener.
