Re: 300 Pounds of Joy (Was Re: 4 July - Help me Think)
On Jul 8, 2007, at 11:12 AM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
1) She lays out the statistics that this is mostly unproven because statistics have only been kept in the post-war era, and this is the first era where the mass of people have not faced real forced hunger. Famine and forced hunger tends to keep weight down.
Then it is proven, no? There were very few fat people, except for the
rich, before the 20th century. That’s back when fat was a status
symbol. Now that 2/3 of Americans have an above-”normal” (pretty odd
definition of normal if only one-third meet it) BMI, thin is a status
symbol.
An economist would argue that the cheapening of food made obesity
possible. Back in the 1950s, households spent 1/3 of their budget on
food. Now it’s about a tenth.
2) As compared to French and Italians. She says that the French and Italians don’t worry about weight and the doctors mostly don’t weigh their patients so with weight among French and Italians it is all self-reported weight. Have you ever actually seen the statistics one weight — as opposed to weight related diseases from other countries?
The WHO has a BMI database:
http://www.who.int/bmi/index.jsp.
Percent “normal” BMI:
Japan 68.9% Italy 54.1 Canada 46.7 U.S. 35.1 U.K. 32,7