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201 points andsoitis | 5 comments | | HN request time: 1.121s | source
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aucisson_masque ◴[] No.41853580[source]
> Can we overcome ageing?

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.

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throwaway2037 ◴[] No.41855406[source]
To be clear, it looks like the health stat term "overweight" means anything greater than "normal", which includes obese.

Quick Google search:

    > what percent of australians are overweight?
First hit:

    > 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.
Source: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/health-conditions-a....

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.

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1. lolinder ◴[] No.41858511[source]
> Both are appalling.

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.

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2. pwillia7 ◴[] No.41859800[source]
How do they even pretend that works when some South Asians are shorter and the Danes are so large? Are the Danish just 100% obese?

This says it's <20% there[1][2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_countr...

2: https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/33/3/463/7058153

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3. s1artibartfast ◴[] No.41860254[source]
Height is factored in, albeit in a very simple way
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4. lolinder ◴[] No.41860545{3}[source]
Yeah, it's not height itself that's the problem, it's body shape. As just one example: some people have long torsos and short legs, others long legs and short torsos. Those two groups will have wildly different BMI curves even at similar health levels.
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5. s1artibartfast ◴[] No.41861682{4}[source]
BMI is a very crude measure. It is only useful in the extreme, and not particularly relevant for an individual. If you have a BMI of 40 you should think about losing weight, but exactly nobody need a composite number to know they are that fat. Similarly, you might have a normal BMI but an LDL of 300 or a strange lump on your thyroid. These things are vastly more important than your BMI