8 Ways to Sunday

Update: An astute reader has pointed out a mathematical error that invalidates this whole post. I’m more careful to check my facts before posting these days than I was when this post was written. Thanks go to Kelly for calling attention to my mistake.

Anyone who lives in the United States has been hearing a lot of news lately about this country’s “obesity epidemic.” Yet another alarming announcement was made yesterday, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the results of a study which concluded that obesity would soon match tobacco use as the number one preventable cause of death in the U.S.

I was reading an article about this announcement when I came to a sidebar with information about the clinical definition of obesity based on body mass index (BMI), the ratio of your height to your weight. Doing a little math I discovered to my surprise that I am just shy of obese myself, with a BMI of 29.

Now I’m a 5-foot-11, 175 pound, 27 year-old male who certainly doesn’t look obese, so this information left me scratching my head. Sure I’m a little soft around the mid-section, but obesity is a dangerous clinical condition. What would I have to weigh to have a BMI lower than 25, the beginning of the “overweight” classification?

Doing the math backwards, I learned that I would have to shrink to a waifish 142 pounds to qualify as “normal.” Even at my most fit, I’ve weighed between 168 and 170 pounds because of the muscle I put on from exercise. There is no way I could achieve this “ideal” weight without losing muscle as well as fat. I’m supposed to believe that’s healthy??

Interestingly, the World Health Organization and CDC reportedly changed their definitions for “overweight” and “obese” in 2000 to simplify statistical calculations. They moved from a system with five classification ranges and different scales for men and women to the current hard and fast two-ratio rule. Has anyone stopped to ask whether the national “epidemic” of obesity is being blown out of proportion by haphazard statistical analysis?

I’m all for promoting public health and physical fitness. It’s more important, however, that alarming news reports like the ones we’ve been hearing lately — and the public policy initiatives that politicians will trot out in response — be based on valid, well-analyzed data. Anything less is putting science at the service of the American beauty obsession.

(citations: Associated Press via MSNBC)