Read any report about the world’s weight problems and you’d think someone super-glued the words “obesity” and “epidemic” together - they always appear side-by-side! In fact, Google currently indexes more than a million pages that contain the phrase “obesity epidemic“.
Now, most people would agree that being overweight or obese is definitely a growing problem and many reports show increasing percentages of obesity in a given population. For example, just early last month, I wrote about the state-wise percentages of obesity in the United States which showed Mississippi topping the list with 30.6% of the adult population classified as obese. But start talking about this being an epidemic (or even raise the issue of how many are, in fact, really obese) and you’ll begin to hear dissenting voices in the crowds.
For example just this week, my del.icio.us feed added two news stories one right after the other and they paint wholly different pictures of the world’s obesity problems. First, WebMD’s The Global Problem of Obesity gives us this sobering piece of information:
In one of the largest studies ever to examine obesity rates across the globe, researchers found that more than 60% of men and 50% of women were either overweight or obese. They concluded that obesity is a growing problem in all regions of the world, even among traditionally lean Asian populations. [WebMD]
With 69,409 men and 98,750 women from 63 countries, this was no small study and various factors like height, weight, disease risk and waist circumference were all used to determine the results. The biggest problem with the study? The fact that it was Body Mass Index (BMI) that was used to determine who was obese and who was not. True, waist circumference was used to determine risk factors of heart disease and diabetes, but we are talking about the very definition of obese here and that brings me to the very next bookmarked article ….
In The Independent’s Who are you calling fat? asks Professor Basham and he goes on to give numerous reasons why the whole “epidemic” of obesity is probably non-existent. Even if you ignore the first reason that the so-called obesity epidemic is simply an attention-grabbing ploy by deep-pocketed bureaucrats and big pharmaceuticals, the other reasons are quite sound and worthy of our consideration:
For a start, the claim that half of the British population will be clinically obese in 25 years assumes, without any empirical foundation, that every overweight child will become an overweight adult and that every overweight adult will progress to obesity.[The Independent]
This is precisely the kind of skewed extrapolation we have all been warned to avoid making during basic statistics classes! Now, BMI itself is a dubious way to decide if a person is obese because a ratio that simply involves height and weight can never account for the amount of muscle a person has as opposed to just fat (see Body Fat Percentage Is A Better Obesity Indicator Than Body Mass Index), but did you know that the BMI classification for “overweight” was changed from 27 to 25 instantly throwing millions of erstwhile normal people into the overweight category? According to Professor Basham no valid reason was ever given for this reclassification. For other reasons and observations that support his conclusion that obesity is probably more hype than reality, do read the entirety of Who are you calling fat?
There is even an entire website dedicated to the obesity myth called, interestingly enough, “Obesity Myths“! Now I must warn you that the publishers of this website (and the free PDF book about Obesity Myths) are from the Center For Consumer Freedom, a front group for restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industries. So take the information on their site witha grain of salt, but keep an open mind. That will be the only way to truly make an informed decision based on facts alone with no influence by agenda-based hype.
My own personal view is that irrespective of what magic number decides who are obese and who are not, what percentages of obese people are living as opposed to just overweight people and so on, the fact remains that we live in a world of excessively processed and packaged foods and seem to have even less chance for physical activity than ever before. Whether the terminology used to denote people is obese or not is of less importance to me than the fact that more needs to be done so we are all happy with the way we personally feel about ourselves and how healthy we think we are.
So it would be best if people worry less about whether they are medically deemed overweight or obese. That’s just a naming convention. Instead there are far better things to worry about like: how do they see themselves in the mirror?, do their clothes fit well and are they confident of themselves while in public?, are they free of the ailments of excesses (heart disease, diabetes, stroke)?, how energetic are they while performing daily tasks like climbing stairs or house-cleaning? and so on.
I know for sure that those things matter more to me than some ratio of height and weight.
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