Onward with the Obesity War

"Obesity is spreading" declared Kate on GMTV. "What", I thought. "We're going to get people with really fat feet?". She meant, of course, that the number of people in this country defined as obese is cropping up all over the country and not just places that Londoners think of as 'fast-food heaven' you know it's occurring in places that they might actually visit for heavens sake.

Anyway Obsolete on septicisle has knocked out a piece fisking the Conservative war on fat; essentially that the guy is talking out of his rear and calling for things that has already been done (though perhaps unknown to him as such things don't appear on the unpackaged organically grown kumquats he buys).

But again I find myself pointing out that the measurement system used for putting people in the underweight/overweight categories was not designed for the purpose it's being used for hell it's definitely not designed for use with children. When I first wrote that I was just under the overweight category and I still am. Yep that's me below, woah got to be careful with my weight as you can tell.



Sure some people just stuff food into themselves and their kids, sure it's costing the NHS money; but if you're going to start sending kids off to fat clubs or creating a fat tax perhaps we should get a system in place that is designed to measure fat rather then just the simplistic weight divided by the square of height that treats us as if we're just fat sausages. Okay it's a rough measure, but it then needs to be backed up by further testing and to be blunt I don't see schools etc. going to the trouble and expense when the original system just needs a scale and a tape.

To put this into a more modern context the Team GB Olympic Hockey player Richard Alexander is declared overweight by the NHS Direct BMI calculator just plug in Metric, Male, 168, 80 and hit calculate. Note however the General Advice below

However, this is general advice for adults only. It does not apply to children, [...] Also, your BMI may not be accurate if you: are a weight-trainer or an athlete

So no children, no athletes; also no-one over the age of 60, or who has a long-term health problem, or pregnant women, or women who are breast feeding. Or you know anyone it wasn't designed to measure, which covers the majority of the population.