loogies, air quality & dehydration

Chinese people hock loogies like nobody's businesses. They are always spitting stuff out everywhere. When you walk down the street you don't have to look out for dog poop or anything, you look of for phlegm. It's got to be crazy unhealthy whatever is going on with them. Obviously the air quality has something to do with it. I thought it was bad in Songyuan, but in Beijing and TEDA it is much worse. It looks like permanent fog everywhere, or a really heavy rainstorm or something. If I start hocking stuff up like them I'm hitting the road. Maybe southern China is better...

They all have to be completely dehydrated all the time too. They drink a fraction of the fluids that I do in a normal day, and I don't drink nearly as much as I used to in the States. Their drinking glasses are very small juice glasses too, which doesn't exactly encourage drinking more. For people that guzzle gallons of soda and other crap I'm sure this is better, but for someone like me that just wants a glass of water, or five, every hour, it's no bueno.