HONG KONG Forget GDP and trade statistics. Look at health, nutrition and the highways as a guide to what is happening in China. A just-released collection of surveys made in 2002, covering all provinces and reflecting urban and rural population weightings, show remarkable advances in nutrition, but also a widening rural/urban gap. They also tell a tale of the rapid advance of noncommunicable diseases linked to eating habits. The average height of Chinese in the 3-to-18 age group has shot up by 3.3 centimeters in just a decade. But there is an even more remarkable 4.6 centimeter gap between the heights of urban and rural residents. This is quite clearly linked to the huge discrepancy in protein consumption, with urban dwellers eating an average 248 grams a day or almost double the rural level. Poultry, eggs and shrimp have been the main sources of the increase. There are more Yao Mings in the making. But that is not all good news. The protein increase has gone along with a sharp rise in consumption of fats, which in urban areas accounts for 35 percent of calorie intake - well above the 30 percent limit recommended by the World Health Organization. That has helped lead to a sharp increase in various diseases. Hypertension now affects almost 20 percent of those over 18, a 31 percent increase over the past decade. High salt intake is a major cause. In the cities, it is too much food and too little exercise which is the bigger problem. In big cities, 30 percent of adults are overweight and 12 percent are classified as obese. One result is that in just six years the prevalence of diabetes for those over 20 in big cities rose from 4.6 percent to 6.4 percent. Indeed, big cities fare worse than medium sized ones, which in turn are worse than smaller urban centers. In rural areas, gains in nutrition have more than offset the negatives. The gap between rural and urban protein intake has narrowed, birth weights have increased and the incidence of growth retardation has fallen. However, in the poorest rural areas it remains a major problem, affecting 29 percent of all children and 35 percent of those under one. These surveys are all about food and diseases and provide an insight into the income growth and distribution in China's food-conscious society. What they don't reflect is the devastation caused by two other consequences of higher incomes - tobacco consumption and the death toll on the roads. Road deaths are now running at over 200,000 a year, compared with 43,000 in the U.S. and 3,500 in Britain 2003. The figures are alarming, given the still-low level of car ownership in China. Tellingly, most of the victims are not the new, largely urban car owners but the rural pedestrians and cyclists who have the misfortune to get in the way of the newly affluent car owners or the self-styled kings of China's roads, the bus and truck drivers. As for the toll from cigarette smoking, it's simply too big to count, or to separate from that of the smoke from factories, powers stations and cars that chokes every big city in China.