Do you get sick "of" or "from" eating Chinese?

McDonald's kills, if you believe the hype. Western food must be unhealthy, otherwise why would only the rich people in Western countries be thin? So we come to China, and cluck over the cuisine - so diverse, so tasty, so affordable. But is it really better for you?

On average, yes. Let ‘average' in this case apply to the diet of the truly average Chinese person versus that of the truly average Westerner. The former constitutes about eighteen hundred calories a day, quickly burned in the process of pedaling, pushing, and hauling for the good of the people. The latter ranges between three and three-and-a-half thousand. Automorph Occidentalis needs perhaps a tenth of that to drive himself from point A to point B, where he burns another fifty to a hundred waggling his fingers over a keyboard and getting a wrist workout with the mouse.

Beijing and Shanghai are anything but average Chinese cities. They're a culinary Sodom and Gomorrah, where every variety of Chinese cuisine imaginable is served up fresh and fattening. Millions of greasy lips daily smack over cauldrons of  shui jiu yu. "Water cooked fish". Hah. Talk about false advertising. All the lao wai food favorites, and plenty of the zhong guo ren's, are deep-fried, oily, super-salty tributes to the climbing power of the yuan. "Why are Chinese people so thin, then?" the skeptical may well ask. First of all, Chinese people used to eat like this once or twice a year, if at all. Secondly, Chinese obesity rates in metropolitan centers are skyrocketing, according to the World Health Organization.

The two main culprits are oil and salt. One clogs, the other raises blood pressure. This is a country where one rarely finds even a leaf of lettuce that hasn't been subjected to a super-heated wok, denuding it of any nutritional benefit, and served swimming in a sauce composed primarily of high-viscosity lubricant. The cheaper the restaurant, the more seldom does it change its oil. As for food stalls on the street, it's common practice to cut corners by buying the old stuff from a nearby place with four walls.

Sports nutritionist Andrew Ogelvy decided to get scientific and measure fat and sodium content in a selection of typical Chinese restaurant fare. His plate of gong bao ji ding was packing close to twenty grams of yucky hydrogenated fat, the same as a medium fries at McDeath. In a cup of ma jiang from an otherwise healthy hot pot meal lurked 1500 mg of sodium. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute says to avoid going over 2400 mg a day, and that our bodies need only a tenth of that.

China Expat hit the streets of  Zhongguancun, Beijing's university district, for some anecdotal evidence from foreign students, figuring they'd only been here a little while and would make an appropriate test group. Out of thirty students polled, with an average stay in China of under one year, only one claimed to have lost weight, while a third said they were about the same weight.

"I thought I'd be getting slim while I studied," says Audrey Dusausoy, a full-time Chinese student from France. "I'm up three kilograms, even with all my bicycle riding." Phil Sanderson, another student, agrees. "If I ate like the average student, you know, instant noodles and lao bing all day, I'd be lean and mean." [We beg to differ.] "But everything looks so good on the menu, and it's all so cheap, I usually need help walking out of the restaurant," he quips, looking down woefully at his hefty midsection. Psst...Audrey and Phil - drink green tea. Lots of it.

How about the student who lost weight? What was her secret? "I just came back from Anhui on a volunteer mission," claims Petra Schein. "Zhou for breakfast, rice and chicken for lunch, rice and vegetables for dinner." She's down about five kilos after a month and a half, but how long will it last? "The first thing I did when I got back to Beijing was go to KFC," she laughs.