Word: overweights
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...heavier than they were 25 years ago. Nor does anyone dispute that, according to the standard measuring tool of body mass index, or BMI (which is calculated by dividing body weight in kilograms by height in meters squared), the majority of Australian and New Zealand adults are either overweight or obese. Based on its National Health Survey 2004-05, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that 62% of men and 45% of women are above their ideal weight range (up from 52% and 37% respectively in 1995). Nor is there any argument that body weight has some relationship to health...
...Nowadays, you don't have love handles, puppy fat or a spare tire-you're overweight or obese. And obesity is a disease. That's the term of choice, anyway, for health authorities such as the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity, which says obesity "is a complex and multifactorial disease." But obesity-defined as a BMI of 30 or greater-is no more a disease than is cigarette smoking or sedentary living. People can be obese but healthy, just as they can be thin and sick. "It really doesn't make sense to call obesity a disease...
...Another habit of obesity alarmists is to conflate those labeled as overweight with those classed as obese, and talk about them as a 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...
...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 toll attributable to excess weight is 26,000 a year (about one-twelfth the figure that many obesity experts had been fond of quoting). But this was more than canceled out by the 34,000 deaths that...
...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...