The Chinese have a long tradition of searching for various ways to maintain health and vitality. There are innumerably many restrictions concerning what foods to eat or not, and what can and cannot do---some valid, others quite questionable. For example, women after child-birth are supposed to stay at home for well over a month--no bathing, no exposure to wind, and no contact to cold water allowed—practically bedridden, in order to help recover from labor, regain strength, and remedy previous gynecological disorders, if any.

During the Cultural Revolution, numerous rather unfounded, dubious and potentially dangerous home-therapies such as the injection of chicken blood were once very popular. Even today, the market is inundated with countless wonder dietary supplements, often containing bold yet unsubstantiated claims of miraculous therapeutic effects. Every winter, people line up traditional Chinese medicine stores to buy “Zi Bu Gao Fang”, some herbal mixtures concocted to boost energy, health and vitality, relieve pains, and fend off illness of various kind. If you watch TV, you will be hardly spared with nearly incessant bombardment of drug commercials and infomercials, each touting its sure-cure therapeutic potency. Even vegetable and fruit vendors can tell you, rather confidently, that certain vegetable or fruit will help “lower your blood pressure and your blood sugar” or even “prevent cancer”.

Ironically, however, over half of this nation’s men smoke cigarettes, even though tobacco use is now well regarded world-wide as the number one preventable cause for cancer, heart disease and stroke---and thus death. Many developed countries now impose hefty sales taxes on cigarettes and ban smoking in public places to discourage smoking. In contrast, cigarette sales in China are strong and constitute an important source of revenue for the government. Even though a lot of people do not smoke, smoke-filled public places make them into unwitting second-hand smokers.

With improving living standard and increasing abundance of food, a lot of people have also increased their waistlines, apparently unaware of the grave perils of obesity. The incidences of breast cancer, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes all have risen sharply in the last decade. In big cities such as Beijing, childhood obesity is used to be very rare but now it is reported to be in the range of 10% (and another 10% of children are overweight). It is a huge public health time-bomb threatening the health of younger and future generations.

The incidence of lung cancer also has risen alarmingly in many cities, yet few people know that air pollution, next to smoking, is the most likely culprit, especially those airborne noxious particles of 0.001-0.1 microns---the concentrations of which, curiously, are not reported in air quality report. Most, if not all, people are seemingly oblivious to the quality of air surrounding them.  

This glaring disparity in attitude and behavior is a great irony and hinderance in the quest for health and vitality, and is somewhat disheartening. Obviously, health educators, public health workers, and government officials have a lot of tough work ahead to do to remedy this to achieve the goal of health for all. They need to differentiate truths from myths, and educate the average Jane and Joe about health risks and how to manage them, and what the healthy lifestyle should be.  Above all, they need to find effective strategies to curb the rising incidence of many diseases that are preventable by simple change of lifestyles. This is not going to be easy, but it has to be done.