By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) – Roughly half of first-time mothers in the U.S. gain too much weight during pregnancy, about the same proportion who are overweight at the start, a study finds. Researchers compared data on more than 2 million U.S. women to a group of about 1,650 of their peers in Germany, where almost three-fourths of first-time mothers started pregnancy at a healthy weight and only 27 percent exceeded weight gain recommendations. “The differences in overweight rates pre-pregnancy and in weight gain are surprising,” lead study author Dr. Joachim Dudenhausen, an obstetrics researcher at Charite University Medicine in Berlin, said by email.

Adult obesity rates reached 9.6 percent in 2012, more than doubling over a decade, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said in a report on national nutrition and chronic diseases. “The problem of overweight and obesity is rising sharply as the dietary make-up has changed,” Wang Guoqiang, a vice director of commission, told a press conference. “Smoking, excessive drinking of alcohol, insufficient physical exercises and unhealthy diet such as high salt and fat consumption are the main behaviour risk factors that trigger and worsen chronic diseases,” Wang said at the briefing Tuesday.

Chinese people are growing taller as the country becomes richer but they are getting fatter even faster, the government and state media said. The proportion of Chinese over-18s who were overweight stood at 30.1 percent in 2012, up 7.3 percentage points over a decade, Wang Guoqiang, a vice director of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told a press conference. The obesity rate had risen by 4.8 percentage points to 11.9 percent, he said Tuesday — a two-thirds increase.