Its Great Famine Now Just a Memory, China Confronts a New
Problem: Obesity Although the era of famine is long past, many
grandparents and parents still push their children to eat a lot.
Setsuko Hosoda, a family doctor at Beijing United Family
Hospital, says the parents and grandparents she sees are "always
worried that their child is not eating enough." A 2012 Penn
State study of 176 Chinese children ages 6 to 18 found that 72
percent of mothers of overweight children thought their children
were normal or underweight. Sissi Zhong, a 26-year-old Beijing
secretary, recalls that her grandparents got angry if she left
food on her plate when she was a child. "They said, 'Do you
know, in my time of food shortages, people didn't have food, so
how can you waste your food?' " Zhong says. So she cleaned her
plate even if she was very full. When her father came home from
business trips with boxes of a Chinese soft drink called
Jianlibao, she started to put on weight. Drinking four and five
cans a day made her weight jum