What shape are you in?
I think I'm in pretty good health for a sedentary 44 year old. I donate blood regularly, so I know my last blood pressure. When it was taken last week, it was 110 over 70, my last cholesterol check was 102. I'm 6'3" and I weigh 215. But according to the CDC's BMI Mass Index I am overweight. I would have to drop another 16 pounds to get to "normal."
Which brings us to this story: The Government's Fat-Fear Farce.
You're probably fat, too. The average woman is 5 foot 3 inches tall. By the time she hits 141 pounds, the government says she is officially "overweight." At 170, she's "obese." The average man of 5 feet, 10 inches hits "overweight" at 174 pounds. By 209 pounds, he's "obese." Something is wrong here. When people like Cruise, world-class athletes and a fit president are being told by the government that they need to lose weight, perhaps there’s something wrong with our metric.
It is interesting about the politics of the study itself:
But last April, a study commissioned by the National Institutes of Health urged by critics of the obesity hysteria confirmed what less hysterical health researchers had suspected all along. The 400,000 figure was wrong. And not by a little bit. The actual figure is closer to 100,000. And guess what? According to recent research, people who are slightly "overweight" are actually healthier than those who are normal weight. When you factor in the number of lives saved by being modestly overweight, the number of people who die due to obesity drops to around 25,000.The CDC has been reluctant to embrace the new study’s figure. That might have something to do with the fact that the CDC’s director, Julie Gerberding, was co-author of the 400,000 study. In fact, a subsequent internal investigation revealed that the CDC may have actually known that the original study was flawed! It seems the study was published over objections from peer-reviewers due to internal politics. In other words, because the boss wrote the study.
Just one more case of bad science, activist researchers who make the facts fit what they think is right, instead of admitting they were wrong and adjusting themselves to fit the facts.
Sheesh.