I am still proud of my TEDx talk, now ten years ago in 2014, at UIBE in Beijing. I tackled what for me was an incredibly important subject: how can people in China live healthy lives, amidst a swirl of public health crises? As an expat family doctor in Beijing for ten years, and a health influencer via my popular blog myhealthbeijing.com and my New York Times health column in Chinese, I was deeply invested in keeping people in China healthy. Everyone, from locals to expats, was so obsessed with air pollution and food safety, that we tended to wildly overestimate their effects on our health. So, I spent 19 minutes showing people how the greatest risk in China was NOT air pollution — it was good old-fashioned heart disease from poor nutrition and lifestyle. I also reviewed my most controversial blog post: how a day’s pollution in Beijing was equivalent to only 1/6 of one cigarette, and how the half of Chinese men’s smoking was a far more serious public health crisis than air pollution.

My focus was to empower the audience that they should NOT feel helpless and hopeless in China, that they had massive control over their future and health — much more than they thought.

What do you think about the risks now, compared to then? I haven’t lived there in 8 years but would think the general risks remain the same; the most recent Global Burden of Disease data set confirms this. Feel free to leave comments below; it’d be good to hear from some old friends.

Here is the video.