Chinese official : Chinese should eat more potatoes, less rice.

[Tshering22]

Doesn't potato makes you fat??

Not if you have means to use all that carb. For example, we in the mountains have far more heapfuls of everything that you guys in the plains eat. And if you come here, you will find a lot of us much slimmer and fitter than the usual string of pot-bellies we see across Indian cities in the north, south and west regions. The reason is both the oriental genetic features which similar to the east Asians, and also terrain, environment and the amount of physical effort made to burn off what one has consumed.

It is all about how much of what you eat actually gets used.

For example, punjabis have a tendency to eat bucket loads of food servings. But except those who live in rural Punjab and are used to tough manual work, others all are fat with huge bellies. Now if you see Rajasthanis and Gujaratis, they have the concept of thalis where they take small portions of everything and thus have control on how much they consume. These guys don't have as much a belly issue.

Thumb rule is; burn the energy that you consume. Just that some bodies are more efficient in digesting the fats that one consumes.

Same rule for folks all over the world, including China.

Americans are fat because of the excess processed fat they consume.

That's a different case though.