The global cost of obesity

All kinds of adjectives have been used to describe China's growth. Unprecendented, exponential, miraculous....unsustainable. The obvious signs of it have been shining new skyscrapers, bullet trains, shopping malls and luxury goods enjoyed by a burgeoning consumer class. But there's another sign now of a quite different kind of growth in China. Unprecedented, exponential....and really quite worrying. Because another thing that is burgeoning is people's waistlines. Chinese are getting fatter.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese have gone from a simple farmer's diet of fresh fruit and vegetables to an urban one filled with fast food - all in the span of a decade or two.

That's meant an astonishing rise in diabetes - eleven times more Chinese have the disease today than had it thirty years ago.

For our global look at obsesity all this week, we've been working with our partner programme in the United States, Marketplace. Their Shanghai correspondent, Rob Schmitz, has our first report. And we also here from Rahul Tandon in Calcutta on the rise of India's obsession with fast food.