Word: bmi
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...single group. For example, instead of saying that about 1 in 5 Australian and New Zealand adults is obese, many experts tend to say that more than half of both populations are overweight or obese. There'd be no problem with that if the two groups' different BMI classifications put them at equal risk of early death. But that's not the case. Indeed, there's compelling evidence that those defined as overweight (with a BMI between 25 and 29.9) are no more likely to die prematurely than people of ideal weight...
...Published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a comprehensive study designed to associate BMI and death risk sent shock waves through the international medical community. A research group led by Katherine Flegal, a senior epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, analyzed data from several large U.S. health studies conducted between 1976 and 2000, controlling for factors such as smoking, age, race and alcohol consumption. They found that while obesity caused about 112,000 deaths a year, being overweight prevented about 86,000 deaths annually. Based on those figures, the net U.S. death...
...While some analysts condemned the study as flawed, its findings delighted University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos, whose provocative book The Obesity Myth was published in 2004. The Flegal study, he says, confirmed at least two of his firmly held views: that the BMI's overweight category is meaningless and that you see a significant increase in the risk of premature death only at the two extremes of weight distribution. "The vast majority of people who are being judged as weighing too much by public health authorities throughout the Western world are at a weight where there...
...relatively small across-the-board weight gain pushing large numbers of people from the top of the ideal-weight category into overweight, and from the top of overweight into obese-subtle shifts, in other words, rather than alarming spikes. Support for that view can be found in creeping mean BMI readings for New Zealand men: they've gone from 25.5 in 1977 to 26.9 in 2003. The starting point for overweight used to be 27, until health authorities-following the W.H.O.'s lead-lowered it in the late 1990s...
...Skeptics argue that far from being a fact, the obesity epidemic is a potpourri of scientific, moral and ideological assumptions. One of these-that fat is bad and will eventually make you sick-ignores evidence that high BMI is associated with lower incidence of numerous diseases and syndromes, including some cancers, emphysema, anemia, bronchitis, osteoarthritis and hip fracture. It also skirts the evidence for fat, in many cases, being little more than a benign marker of an individual's genetic predisposition to carry it. According to GPs, there are many people who eat sensibly, exercise regularly and have excellent health...