A cultural difference...or a clueless husband?

Okay, so I'm at work the other day. There's this older Vietnamese guy who works in my department, and we were chatting. He starts talking about his family, and he's like 'My wife is very fat. She's too fat. No good. Not pretty.' (I'm paraphrasing here, his English is not very fluent). Of course I didn't really know what to say to that, so I was like 'Oh no!', hoping that he didn't actually say that to his wife. Well, guess what--he kinda did. And he's like 'She doesn't care (that she's fat). She doesn't want to lose weight.' So I said to him 'Dude, in America, that is a one way ticket to the dog house.' He laughed, but I don't think he had any idea what I meant.  But seriously, he didn't think there was anything wrong with this. Now, I'm all for honesty, but...is this something you should really say to your wife? And if you were a wife--particularly a fat one--would you want to hear it? Just sayin'...