Chinese consume too much food from animals, experts say

For health reasons, men should limit daily consumption of meat under 75 grams and women under 50 grams, according to a food consumption guideline from the CDC.

Ma Guansheng, deputy director of the National Institute for Nutrition and Food Safety, said that the consumption of animal food in China might keep increasing for a while.

Yang Yuexin, a veteran researcher of the institute, agreed. "That has been in line with the country's economic growth," she said.

Usually, with economic development, animal food consumption tends to increase, she added.

For instance, while US residents consume more than 100 kg of meat per capita a year, meat consumption there has been on the decline for years.

"We Chinese should try avoiding that kind of overconsumption, which poses public health challenges as well," she said.

In 2010, more than 30 percent of Chinese 18 and older were overweight, and the obesity rate was 12 percent, surveys by the health authorities showed.

Meanwhile, about 260 million people were suffering some sort of chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes.

"These major public health risk factors are closely associated with food consumption," she said.

In response, the government vowed in the latest guideline to establish mechanisms to monitor people's diets, strengthen supervision and information analysis, promote healthy food consumption, and intervene in areas or among groups where people are suffering from bad nutrition.

Also, for a balanced and healthy food consumption, the average daily energy intake of people should be between 2,200 to 2,300 calories, with at least 50 percent of energy provided by grain, and energy provided by fat comprising no more than 30 percent, it specified.

Ma, of the National Institute for Nutrition and Food Safety, said public nutritional health education is important to achieve the target.

On a positive note, recent surveys showed that in large cities, meat consumption stabilized or even declined thanks to rising nutritional health awareness, he said.

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