BMI is an arbitrary measure and it is true that medically it has dubious value as indicator of health, or even healthy weight, except at the extreme ends of the scale. It was simply used as a lazy parameter by insurance companies (to deny or increase insurance premiums) and now it is used to deny people hip and knee surgeries in the NHS which arguably leads to much higher morbidity and mortality over time than the actual weight at assessment.I feel like tbe only one, but I'm not a fan of her music. It's over sentimental and sounds like it's been made for an X factor montage.
BMI isn't a load of tit, I worry that a medical professional would say that. It's a measurement that for 99% of people gives a good indication. If you're a pro rugby player it is a bit of a blunt tool
It really doesn't take much to be obese on BMI. Probably half of adults are.
Also, the “normal” range has been decreased many times, leading to what is now referred to as the “obesity epidemic” even though research shows that mean weight of the population hasn’t increased significantly since 1980s. It’s the same tactic to increase revenue within pharmaceutical sector, as arbitrarily lowering values for blood glucose and cholesterol, which has led to huge increase in prescription of blood pressure pills and statins for people who would have been seen as within normal range prior to tinkering with the numbers. Some people with certain medical conditions such as diabetes have been shown to profit from maintiaining lower values, but these tactics have led to sweeping changes across the population and many people are caught up in it, and it’s not necessarily to their benefit.
Anyway, I could go on, as I am medically qualified (and I agree with the doctor mentioned above, most doctors have deeper understanding of these issues than what can be read in newspaper headlines) and I have seen it all change over the past 20+ years. The diet industry is one of the most profitable in the world, and considering that over 90% of dieters across the board fail to keep the weight off for longer than a year or two, means that dieting and weight loss strategies have less than 10% success rate (some research shows that success rate is as low as 3%). Any other medical tretament would be abandoned based on these stats, but dieting is profitable because it locks essentially normal people, who just happen to be larger, or not fitting perfectly into narrow and arbitrary BMI standards, into cycles of dieting, spending on programmes, yo yoing, damaging their metabolisms and eventually gaining vastly more weight due to this damage, than they originally started with, while companies profit.
Media has potentiated this incredibly simplistic narrative, that BMI is be all end all, that weight loss is always good, while perpetuating images of bodies that are realistically present in less that 5% of the population. Plastic surgery, eating disorders, substance abuse and chronic dieting are all health hazards and yet they are completely normalised due to cult of beauty, and good luck dissuading anyone who’s been swallowing this propaganda for years, that it’s not all as it seems.
We can talk about healthy eating and exercise, those are worthwhile topics, as are risk factors (based on statistics) for developing disease. Being overweight, smoking, high cholesterol, family history are some of many risk factors for development of various diseases, and just because someone has a risk factor it doesn’t mean that they will get sick. Two other issues to consider when trying to understand what statistics that are generating these guidelines mean are that correlation doesn’t imply causation, and that funding is extremely selective and can be used to generate huge amounts of data in support of a certain bottom line, while ensuring no balanced research is being done, and this is exactly what‘s happened with research into obesity. I have seen this manipulation through funding first hand, and the fact research is far from impartial and used to generate profit for certain industries is a known issue in medical and science communities. Unfortunately this has gone so far now that nobody knows how to fix it, but damage done to human health is huge, if you only remember rigged research into antidepressants where millions of children ended up unnecesserily medicated.
I’m only sharing what I know, I’m not here for sniping and arguing, so you can take what I’m saying or leave it, but I urge you to research this topic using scholarly references. There’s a reason why we can’t just go and build bridges without an engineering degree, medicine is no different.
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