TheAgitator.com
Lonely Dissent
Tuesday, July 27th, 2004Here’s a nice L.A. Times piece on critics of the obesity hysteria. Regular readers will recognize this nugget:
Our plumpness status is measured using an estimate of body fat called body mass index â a person’s weight in pounds multiplied by 703, divided by the square of one’s height in inches. People are classed as obese if their BMI is 30 or above â a cutoff chosen because studies suggest that health risks are significantly heightened beyond this point. They are overweight if they have a BMI of 25 or above.Until 1998, this overweight threshold was 27, but as the studies on health risks piled up, the National Institutes of Health lowered the cutoff to that already in use by the World Health Organization. Overnight, about 30 million Americans became unacceptably big.
Remember that next time you see one of those scary “before and after” maps, where they color in states where more than 10 percent of the population is obese, and show strikingly divergent maps from, say, 1990 look than maps from 2000. I’ll repeat for effect: Overnight, 30 million Americans became overweight, solely because the NIH redefined what “overweight” means.
why were they using two different definitions of overweight in the first place?
Naturally, every single football player is now considered to be an unhealthy fat slob, who will die of a heart attack at the age of 32.
BMI is by far the most idiotic way of estimating fat content. In other words, it’s perfect if you have an idiotic agenda.
It’s a fucking miracle that Tom Cruise, Arnold Swarzenegger and Sly Stallone are still breathing. Jesus, just look at their BMI’s! Walking corpses, I’m tellin ya…
I wonder if that makes even Ann Coulter overweight?
6′0″, 185lbs is overweight! Ha! And I was always referred to as the “skinny kid” growing up! I can’t wait to tell everyone back home. That is, if my fat ass can make it from the couch to the phone without passing out.