Quote:
Originally Posted by flylock shox
Well, that saved me some time. Thanks for that  |
No problem, sorry if I stole your reply! I had the info on hand from something else I was doing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chemgear
While I can understand that BMI isn't a perfect measurement, I am a little puzzled why it seems like the massive growth in overweight/obesity is often waved away in the name of making feel better about themselves. Don't get me wrong, I'm not interesting in bullying to get people to change. But it seems like people (in general) like to ignore the problem or blame it on genetics or how talking about how bad the issue is an assault on people's feelings.
Having just been in on a trip to Asia and back home, it is STAGGERING how large Canadians/North Americans are.
I'm a numbers guy so for the sake of comparison:
- more than 2/3 of all people are overweight or outright obese, nearly 70%
- roughly 1-2% of people suffered bulimia
- roughly 1-4% of people suffered anorexia
http://www.anad.org/get-information/...rs-statistics/
http://www.disordered-eating.co.uk/e...istics-us.html
Don't get me wrong, bulimia and anorexia are not good things (terrible actually) but they are not even in the same ballpark as a societal problem and cost. |
From what I can find there is no "massive growth" in overweight/obesity. I haven't had the opportunity to research this myself in-depth, but the info I've heard recently is "The “epidemic” refers to a rise of 10-15 pounds in the average weight of US adults between 1980 and 1999. The rise was over before most of the “obesity epidemic” rhetoric began."
Not only that, but the rise in the number of overweight/obese individuals as classified by BMI may not actually be a rise in weight, but rather a change in what is defined as overweight. In 1998 the National Institute of Health changed the BMI number that determined people to be overweight from (if memory serves me correctly) 27 for women and 28 for men, down to 25 for both men and women. Overnight a massive number of people went from being "normal" to being overweight (and from being overweight to being obese). Nothing changed about their bodies or their lives, the only thing that changed was a label.
The reason that anorexia and bulimia are taken so much more seriously than people being overweight or obese is because being overweight or obese isn't a life threatening mental disorder, it's simply body composition. An anorexic or bulimic is going to be unhealthy (at the very least psychologically), someone who is overweight is quite possibly perfectly fine.