75% American are overweight..
Just let it sink a second, they speak about how many baby born after 2000 will reach 100 years old, how we are reaching the absolute limit of human survival.
75% overweight... Everyone know fat people don't live long. I bet all the studies done in the 90's that predicted we would easily be able to reach 100 years old didn't take that into account.
Quick Google search:
> what percent of australians are overweight?
> Over the last decade, the proportion of adults who were overweight or obese has increased from 62.8% in 2011–12 to 65.8% in 2022.
US NIH says: 73.1% are overweight (includes obese). Ref: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
Sure, 73.1% > 65.8%, but Australia is still plenty overweight. Both are appalling.
So the line between normal and overweight is somewhat blurry. e.g. someone who is 6'3" and weighs 200 pounds is overweight. Which might or might not be the case (but you certainly don’t need to a body builder or invest a lot of time to maintain at least reasonably healthy 18-20% body fat ratio).
Both are also largely meaningless because they're based on BMI, which is literally just mass/height^2. No measure of percent body fat, no measure of any other aspect of health, just mass by the square of height.
If you're comparing the BMI of two countries with very similar gene pools it's not a bad point of comparison (though the raw number still doesn't tell you much without more context about build types), but when you're comparing Australia to the US the gene pools of the non-European minority groups are sufficiently different to make BMI pretty worthless as a point of comparison for public health.
It's a pretty straightforward formula, and even though the cutoffs might be arbitrary, there's undoubtedly a u shaped mortality curve centered somewhere around 20-25. At a population level I don't think any of that is a relevant factor. No one thinks that your risk of death hinges on crossing an arbitrary line, but being fatter definitely isn't good for your health.
Bone density, muscle mass, torso height relative to leg height—none of these things are factored into BMI and all of these vary wildly depending on genes.
This says it's <20% there[1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...
Similarly, cancer risks may scale with the amount of tissue or the surface area for things like skin / colon cancer but it’s hard to see how being taller is beneficial.
Being born with worse attributes doesn't mean those attributes are out of the equation. A lot of people die much younger than they should just by poor luck, with little or no control on their end.
If you happen to have higher bone density and higher muscle mass just because you have higher testosterone, you're still better off. Sometimes people just get the short end of the stick. That doesn't necessarily mean BMI doesn't work.
I've even met smokers, smokers! Who have better cardiovascular health than me and are skinnier. Which really fucking sucks for me.