I'm three terrorists at least!
'If you're a fatty AND a smoker, you're almost as bad as TWO terrorists'
I'm a fatty and I both smoke and drink. What a bastard!
Forget the climate: Fatties are a much bigger problem - study
The BMI-fuelled "obesity epidemic" bandwagon continues to rumble along, with the latest ridiculous report claiming that swingbellies are now twice as serious a menace to human prosperity as climate change. No, really. The giant brains of the McKinsey Global Institute have assembled this authoritative graph, which ranks the …
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Friday 21st November 2014 09:30 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Re: A better measure...
Height to girth, or chest to belly girth ratios are dimensionless and MUCH better for that reason.
The BMI based on a power of 2.5 might be better, but why not the power of three that simple geometry suggests? There may be empirical or statistical reasons for the power of 2.5, but it does look a bit like some people do not want to admit how totally stupid the power of 2.0 was and switch to 3.0 directly. After all, if I simply scale a short, skinny athlete by 10% in all directions, his weight should go up by a factor of 1.331, keeping his body fat percentages, height to girth ratios, etc identical. Thus, I feel 2.5 is a compromise, rather than entirely reasonable. Even if some fit was made to empirical data, I am deeply suspicious that the result would be 2.5 exactly, right between the traditional value and the one suggested by geometry.
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Friday 21st November 2014 09:56 GMT wiggers
Re: A better measure...
If you follow the link they say, "You might think that the exponent should simply be 3, but that doesn't match the data at all. It has been known for a long time that people don't scale in a perfectly linear fashion as they grow. I propose that a better approximation to the actual sizes and shapes of healthy bodies might be given by an exponent of 2.5." So, it is a 'best guess' but, since BMI is only intended to be a rough indicator that suggests other health indicators should be looked at more closely, it's good enough.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:26 GMT cambsukguy
Re: A better measure...
hilarious calculator, I would have to be 27Kg lighter to be at the bottom of my acceptable range, albeit only 10Kg lighter to be at the top.
Since my waist size is almost exactly half my height and the best condition I have ever been in - able to run for several hours - was about 5Kg and 15 years ago, I suspect the new calculator isn't much cop either. 10Kg would leave me lean indeed, 27 Kg, dangerously wasted.
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Sunday 23rd November 2014 08:50 GMT Tim Worstal
Re: A better measure...
I once had a long email correspondence with a professor (at, I think, Oxford) trying to work out why 2 and not 3 was the answer. Volume should indicate 3, as the article insists. But the answer came back that it was a bit more complex as not everything does quite scale that way. Trunk, perhaps, yes. Arms, legs, head, not so much. And a surprising amount of the weight of a human isn't in the trunk. That was the gist of it at least. He was willing, in he end, to move to something like that 2.5 but insisted that 3 would be wrong.
Can't remember all the details but that was the gist of it.
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Friday 21st November 2014 13:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: They aren't a problem; they're a solution!
"One word: Biofuel"
Already happening round these parts. The local crematorium supplies "waste heat" to the swimming pool. This warm swimming session brought to you by.......". Admittedly most of the heat is probably from natural gas, though.
Some fag packet calculations suggest (if I've got my maths right, which is open to question) a human body would embody around 600 MJ of energy. In the UK there's around 1m deaths a year, and factoring this all down that's around 150 GWh if you dessicated them. At say 50% efficiency that's be equivalent to a 15 MW power station, which isn't very much in the context of peak electricity demand of 60 GW.
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Friday 21st November 2014 14:52 GMT Matt 21
Re: They aren't a problem; they're a solution!
So we need to eat more????
Ahh, I've got it, we need to die having eaten more curry in order that the methane count is high and we need to collect the boiled off water to solve the water problem too.
Perhaps we could keep our lardy bodies hooked up to some kind of dream machine so we could be grown more efficiently.......
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Friday 21st November 2014 10:34 GMT ElReg!comments!Pierre
Re: They aren't a problem; they're a solution!
One word "tree" (or "vegetation" take your pick).
As much as we'd love it to be true, in the real world land vegetation is pretty much carbon-neutral (appart from marshes). The most effective carbon trap is ocean-based, as the dead organisms fall to anoxic depths where they sit for a very long time (until we dig them up and burn them as coal and oil, that is).
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Monday 24th November 2014 01:09 GMT Martin Budden
Re: They aren't a problem; they're a solution! @TechnicalBen
Icon, as it's all about turning hydrocarbons to their elements and back again.
I hate to get all technical on you TechnicalBen but you seem to have confused hydrocarbons with carbohydrates.
Carbohydrate = carbon-containing molecule made by vegetation very recently which can be used as a renewable energy source i.e. biofuel.
Hydrocarbon = carbon-containing molecule made by vegetation millions of years ago, buried, compressed, and turned into a non-renewable energy source i.e. fossil fuel.
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Friday 21st November 2014 09:31 GMT Truffle
Muscle, not fat
Apart from one sentence at the end, the entire article misses the vital information that muscle weighs far more than fat. There are many, many people (especially as, in the last 5 years or so, people really are getting on the health 'bandwagon') like myself, who fall into the 'overweight' category despite having sub 15% bodyfat.
Whether the brackets for the height of people being measured is accurate, its a person's composition which vitally isn't measured in any way using BMI.
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Saturday 22nd November 2014 00:16 GMT Scroticus Canis
Re: Muscle, not fat - "BMI is a rule-of-thumb measure for Joe Public"
BMI is a rule-of-thumb measure for
Joe Publicretards - FTFY.Look up endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph to get a true grip of how stupid BMI really is (not everyone is built the same) and then realise that your GP/Practice Nurse have never learnt about it (or maybe did, like I did at medical school) but are just pushing the latest NHS crap fad as real medicine.
Just like the low dietary salt saga; 1mmHg being the difference in blood pressure between a low salt diet and a normal salty diet, not really significant at all. OK some people are sensitive to salt but some are also allergic to peanuts or mushrooms, etc... so we better not allow peanut butter or mushrooms, etc... for anyone.
Oh and by the way - smoking, drinking fatties tend to have a relatively short terminal illness phase and don't linger on thus costing less in late life health care than those who do. Or so the actuaries say.
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Friday 21st November 2014 10:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Muscle, not fat
" the entire article misses the vital information that muscle weighs far more than fat"
The definitions of fatness are the least of the problems here. The original "study" concentrates on GDP, so that 4m deaths from inadequate water and sanitation in the undeveloped world count for almost nothing, whereas 5m deaths largely among the older residents of the developed world top the bill, followed closely by the "overweight".
Yet even if you wish to look through an economic lens, the work is shoddy. With the developed world suffering from over-stretched welfare systems and inadequately funded pension systems, smoking and heart disease are fantastic economic news - people work till they're fifty-sixty and drop dead with little or no pension being paid. I'd accept that many smokers and fatties linger on in expensive ill health, but that's also true amongst the non-obese, non-smoking population.
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Friday 21st November 2014 10:48 GMT P. Lee
Re: Muscle, not fat
Technically true, but the #1 premature killer in West is heart disease. That's mostly not from being ultra muscley.
Climate change may kill people in the future. Heart disease is killing a lot of people right now and will continue doing so in the future, so despite the rubbish method of reaching the conclusion, the conclusion is probably correct.
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Friday 21st November 2014 15:56 GMT Spleen
Re: Muscle, not fat
"Technically true, but the #1 premature killer in West is heart disease."
That's primarily because fewer people are dying from infant mortality, war, malnutrition and contaminated water, so they grow old enough to die of heart disease.
People who quote this stat in this particular way seem to be unaware of the fact that /something/ will always be the "#1 premature killer". If we eliminated heart disease it would be cancer (I'm guessing). That wouldn't be evidence of a cancer epidemic.
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Friday 21st November 2014 09:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hail the Fatty Heroes !
Hmmm sounds the report might have touched a sore spot in many.... :-)
What the report did not consider is that fat is essentially a carbohydrate and that us swingbellies are actually sacrificing our health and greek god (and goddesses) physiques to contribute to the world wide effort of carbon dioxide sequestration in our adipose rotundities !
Should we all suddenly become treadmill afficionados and convert from bacon sarnies to kale chips the world production of noxious gases would immediately increase 5 fold.
Hail the much maligned fatty heroes!
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Friday 21st November 2014 10:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hail the Fatty Heroes !
"You should be taxed for the extra strain you put on services."
If you're going to target the obeasts in this way, then presumably fags will come with a subsidy because of their beneficial effect on unfunded pension costs? Contact and adventure sports players will be taxed due to the burden on A&E. Duty will be charged on skateboards, horse riding tackle, and so forth. We should have a safety tax on ladders and power tools. Central heating and gas cooking will be taxed for air quality reasons, the Tube will have a five pound per journey surcharge for its rancid air quality, diesel will be £10 a litre, but current standard petrol cars will be getting a rebate.
But since you're suggesting a PAYG approach to public services, I'd like to opt out of the welfare state, please, contributions to the EU budget, UK infrastructure investments (always the wrong, expensive stuff that gets built, not the required everyday stuff), overseas aid (wasted and misspent), and the education budget (if I had the money they'd both be in independent schools).
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hail the Fatty Heroes !
"SOOOOOO many ways to read this sentence..."
Are there? I could only see the one, that smoking related diseases (lung cancer and circulatory problems) build up over some years with generally modest impact on health, but by the time they are diagnosed they are usually very serious, leading to high mortality rates and low life expectancy. Whilst having an acute hospital episode is always expensive, if you don't live to old age then you don't collect much of your pension, and you don't incur mid-level health costs over a long old age. Most of us will be able to see the health and longevity aspects in their own family history over perhaps the past two generations. And the problem is that as healthcare improves we prolong post-retirement life, increasing the cost of both pensions and healthcare to an economically inactive segment of the population.
Use to be the case that you worked from 16-65, and expected to live to 72. So 49 years work to 7 year retirement. Now we expect people to work from 18-67, but to live to about 80, so still 49 years working, but now 13 years retirement. And not only is there the healthcare costs to contribute to that extra 6 years, but there's the routine costs of healthcare, the rising dementia and care home costs. I say free fags and big macs all round.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:47 GMT cambsukguy
Re: Hail the Fatty Heroes !
Smokers get emphysema, which can be a long-lasting and very expensive malady, more often.
Smokers get lung cancer, which can be a long-lasting and very expensive malady, more often.
Smokers get dementia, which can be a long-lasting and very expensive malady, earlier and more often.
Smoking causes people to discard butts in the street, which is disgusting and dirty and requires money to clean up.
Smoking caused an economic cost of the loss of business from people unwilling to sit in restaurants and cafes - especially with children - because of the smoke. The loss is almost certainly as large as the so-called benefit of having the smokers there - most of whom remained of course after the ban.
This is not taking into account what a dying smoker is doing to their children, economically and psychologically.
I am certain that a smoke-free country would be better off, especially in the long term, than a smoking country.
We shall see the evidence of this when China's smokers reach a certain age and start to die in massive numbers, slowly and expensively, or cheaply and horribly depending on the state of their state at the time.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hail the Fatty Heroes ! @cambsukguy
"I am certain that a smoke-free country would be better off, especially in the long term, than a smoking country."
Greetings Mr Logic.
I am certain that in economic (or life years) terms a drug free, alcohol free, car free, processed meat free, TV-and-couch-potato free country would be better off. But you're welcome to go and live in one of those. The nearest I can imagine to that is probably North Korea, where Kim Jong-Un is bravely consuming all those bad things so that the proletariat can enjoy a healthy exercise filled life.
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Friday 21st November 2014 12:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hail the Fatty Heroes ! @cambsukguy
False dichotomy time. Doesn't North Korea have high levels of smoking and very high levels of actual poverty?
Singapore is perhaps the closest real example of what you describe. And Singapore has to have very tight restrictions on immigration because so many people want to live there.
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Friday 21st November 2014 13:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hail the Fatty Heroes ! @cambsukguy
"Singapore is perhaps the closest real example of what you describe. And Singapore has to have very tight restrictions on immigration because so many people want to live there."
A quick internet search indicates that Singapore has high alcohol and tobacco taxes, but that's true of a lot of countries, I was suggesting our volunteer go somewhere that all the things I mentioned are actually unavailable.
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Friday 21st November 2014 12:46 GMT dogged
Re: Hail the Fatty Heroes !
> Smokers get dementia, which can be a long-lasting and very expensive malady, earlier and more often.
Actually, that one's bollocks. Smokers get less dementia, probably because we thoughtfully and considerately don't live long enough to get it really badly.
The cost of emphysema and lung cancer is minimal because so few smokers undergo treatment. Most just die.
>We shall see the evidence of this when China's smokers reach a certain age and start to die in massive numbers, slowly and expensively, or cheaply and horribly depending on the state of their state at the time.
That one'll haunt you if it doesn't actually end up happening.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
"You should be taxed for the extra strain you put on services."
Then my dear I suggest a general tax on life ! Because anything anyone does in this world is a "strain" on services....
Following your stream of thought why don't we just do some major "ethnic" cleansing and neuter or let starve the "useless" 2/3 of the world's population so we don't need to grow all this polluting food? That only works of course If I am the one deciding who gets to stay :-)... Oh wait didn't a guy called Hitler try that a while back?
[For the overly literally minded readers - I am being cynical]
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Friday 21st November 2014 09:53 GMT ElReg!comments!Pierre
In terms of costs...
Remember that the graph is an estimation of the "buden to economy" which is really how much is spent... obviously heavily biased towards 1st-world perceived problems.
The millions of people who die directly or indirectly from starvation obviously don't weight much (no pun) in such calculations, as they mainly starve because noone spends money on them, so to speak. On the other hand billions are spent every year in campains against gobstuffing. In fact I'd even say that most of the "underweight" bar comes from western world campains against eating disorders, not from 3rd-world people who actually die by the million.
Basically this kind of "analysis" is the typical self-feeding crap: because we spend a lot of money on it it means "obesity" is a big problem, so we obviously need to spend more money on it.
People love that crap because you can't be wrong. It's bit like stock market analysis: if I'm a "big name" I can say that company x is a good bet and company y a bad one. The actual wealth and management quality of the companies don't matter a bit because investors will read my paper and invest in company x, causing the share to rise and making it a good bet, while they'll dump company y causing it to crash. Perfect fortunetelling.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:55 GMT cambsukguy
Re: In terms of costs...
Always made me wonder why fat people of my acquaintance and otherwise, always saying how hard it is to lose weight don't use the "Going to Darfur" diet.
I have known a few people who have travelled to such places to help, as doctors or aid workers etc.
Without exception, each one has returned lighter, often unhealthily so, by our standards at least. With the sun and the extra wrinkles, some looked 10 years older after only a few months.
As one might expect, regular food brought them back to looking well but there is always that feeling that eating too much is sinful after seeing what they have seen.
And, of course, being who they are, often the best of us, they are looking to head back there or elsewhere.
Still, there is no harm is someone going to help and hoping to help themselves too, more than one life could be saved.
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Friday 21st November 2014 09:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Time to start taxing these lard buckets
People should get assessed annually (perhaps a proper medical check) and that should include a check on how fat they are (can't use BMI, it's not that great a measure).
If you are overweight, a scaled % gets added to your income tax until you stop shovelling food down your gullet, get off your fat ass and do some exercise. Or get help with whatever is causing the compulsion to eat.
This could be doubled up with an eye exam so that the blind drivers can be removed from the roads.
Yes, this would all cost but I conjecture that the savings from lower costs, less accidents and the early detection of disease would more than offset any cost.
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Friday 21st November 2014 10:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Time to start taxing these lard buckets
Economical incentive does not always work.
If a person already cared about a cost, they'd curtail it already and not need a further financial incentive.
Same applies to gambling or alcohol addictions. It's mainly an education and welfare problem. Education so people know the dangers and how to escape the situation and welfare so they don't fall to it as a comfort to other ills.
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Friday 21st November 2014 10:49 GMT ElReg!comments!Pierre
Re: Time to start taxing these lard buckets
If you are overweight, a scaled % gets added to your income tax until you stop shovelling food down your gullet, get off your fat ass and do some exercise.
I'm sure it sounds like a good idea to some, but real-world evidence (mostly based on correlation, not direct causation, but that's all I have) suggests that in rich countries the less money you have, the fatter you get. Because instead of stuffing your gob with aspararus, aragula, ananas, abalone and aardvark*, you use McDonalds and Pizza Hut as your stomach balast.
So a fat tax will not actually work. Mandatory exercise camps, on the other hand...
*OK, not really
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Time to start taxing these lard buckets
"If you are overweight, a scaled % gets added to your income tax until you stop shovelling food down your gullet,"
Strange isn't it. Round these parts people scream in outrage over their loss of freedom due to NSA and GCHQ's vast datascraping. Yet when it comes to food, many of the same people think that anybody larger than they are should be forced not to eat as much. Hey, overweight people, we've decided you're not capable of exercising choice, so we're going to force you to fit our idea of how you should look.
I'm bang on the quack's view of a healthy weight, but I'd like to stand shoulder to shoulder with my big boned bretheren for their right not to be treated as third class citizens, not to be unduly harassed or ridiculed, and to be allowed to behave as they see fit.
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Friday 21st November 2014 12:53 GMT Ike Aramba
Re: Time to start taxing these lard buckets
It wouldn't be a surprise if a significant portion of our obese fell into the economically inactive category. If you also want to reduce the benefits paid to these people you'd have my support, however if you want to tax obese people more just to feed our bloated & obese government then count me out.
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Friday 21st November 2014 13:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Time to start taxing these lard buckets
It wouldn't be a surprise if a significant portion of our obese fell into the economically inactive category.
It's tempting to conclude this, but the real data isn't quite as clear cut. Obesity does correlate with lower income, but the actual difference between the most deprived quintile and the second quintile is fairly modest. For men even the top quintile shows limited difference. The only relatively low obesity group by income are women in top income quintile. See figure 1 in this:
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCgQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.noo.org.uk%2Fuploads%2Fdoc%2Fvid_16966_AdultSocioeconSep2012.pdf&ei=H0BvVJy9OoLkaonDgLAB&usg=AFQjCNG_cH_3mexqxPk_osubygQ6XDVKPA&bvm=bv.80185997,d.d2s&cad=rja
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Friday 21st November 2014 10:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Web site request
"(Page & Orlowski I am looking at you.)"
This is where you need to be:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/technology
But on a more serious note, the article is using an inflammatory headline as clickbait. Other than that's its reportage, and nothing wrong with it. The comments section on the other hand is a bit dispiriting, with more than a few AC's queuing up to put the boot in. Nice to know they're so lean, athletic and clean living. Or maybe they're just cunts.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:06 GMT werdsmith
Re: Web site request
"(Page & Orlowski I am looking at you.)"
Yes, I found myself wondering if somebody had challenged Lewis Page to write an article of as many straw men as possible. Ironically, straw men aren't normally obese according to the BMI scale, unless it has been raining a lot and they've been left outside.
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Saturday 22nd November 2014 12:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Web site request
"with a name like Simon Bacon perhaps the simplest solution would be to just eat him?"
In principle I'd not have a problem with trying a slice, dry cured, medium sliced and cooked crisp, please. But what if he's got something nasty like BSE? Wouldn't we have to kill him before 30 months if he's for the table? I suspect we may be a bit late for that.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:17 GMT b0llchit
Skinny vs Fat
Well, terrorists are a skinny subset of the population. Therefore, skinny people are much more likely to be terrorists than the fatty kind of people.
The only conclusion this allows is that both fat and skinny people cost us all a lot of money. We'd all be better off killing both parts of the population. It also would reduce the smokers to a mere minimum and certainly reduce the emissions of dangerous gasses.
Now, since war and unrest is a small subset of the costs, it would probably be correct to assume that a one-time expenditure for global correction would not be too bad. Especially seen in the context where the new order is unlikely to proceed with current statistical sets and will start a new lie^H^H^Hdataset.
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Friday 21st November 2014 12:07 GMT b0llchit
Re: Skinny vs Fat
The terrorists will take care of the fats, the alcoholics will kill the terrorists in a road-accident, the alcoholics will drive into a ravine after scooping up some elderly crossing the road, the smokers will die out coughing, the remaining elderly demented have no clue what is going on anyway, and the sensible rest of us will sit by, watch tv and die from intolerable boredom.
What is left is a clean earth...
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Friday 21st November 2014 12:51 GMT Kubla Cant
Re: Skinny vs Fat
have you ever seen a fat terrorist, or a drunken one?
It's going back a bit, but Brendan Behan* was an IRA volunteer and pictorial evidence suggests he sank a good few Guinesses with consequent effect on his girth. He may not actually have been a fat, drunken terrorist, but I bet a few of his co-volunteers were.
* Lest I unleash a storm of Hibernian protest, let me say that I intend no sleight on the man's literary output.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:29 GMT Anonymous Coward 101
I note...
...there is no entry on their table for costs due to dementia and other old age illnesses. If they had, where would that come out? Did they factor in the fact that smokers tend to die proportionally less from old age illnesses compared with non-smokers, thereby saving society money? If one ignores this saving, the societal costs of smoking are indeed massive: I suspect they have deliberately left out the savings to make smoking appear more costly than it is.
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Friday 21st November 2014 11:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
I thought Lewis was a British, technical journalist
But he expresses his weight in US style pounds rather than stone and, anyway, being an journalist on tech. stuff, has he not yet learnt about the metric system? If we assume that some non-brits and non-yanks read TR occasionally, this would be the correct system that, after all, even Lewis must have learnt at school and possibly in the Royal Navy.
Still, 16 or 17 stone or 105 or so Kg.!
Back to the units: I often think his "technical" and "scientific" credentials seem not to be up to the matters subject to his comments. This is just further evidence to support my suspicions. If one is uncomfortable with both the units used in one's own country and in one's supposed field of expertise ....
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Friday 21st November 2014 12:19 GMT kdh0009
The joys of misrepresenting data
Good article, and a candidate for FoTW in its own right.
However you have slightly missed the climate point being presented by the nice graph on page 1.
The whole reason we have a climate change debate is because doing something about climate change is expensive, whilst not do something about climate change is essentially free (or at least the problem of some future generation to calculate). This is the explanation all of the red-state governers use to justify doing nothing about it.
But the graph is correct in that the ECONOMIC impact of climate change itself is either low (or massive, but incalculable in $ :-) )
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Friday 21st November 2014 13:11 GMT wolfetone
I'm not exactly skinny. I am 6ft 3, and I weigh in at 18st 6. I play Rugby (switch between Prop and Second Row), and before that I used to do Boxing for 10 years until I had to retire because of my knee. The lowest weight I could get to while boxing was 15st. And believe me I tried to get below 14st 4 which would have taken me down from Super Heavyweight to Heavyweight which would have given me an advantage.
What cost have I been to the NHS due to my weight? None actually. I'm not diabetic, and I don't have any diseases. I'm expecting heart disease because my Dad had two heart attacks and the men on my mothers side of the family have all died from heart attacks. The only cost I have been to the NHS was through my own bad luck.
A busted knee done by falling off a bike trying to exericse.
A broken thumb from falling off a bike a second time trying to get fit to go back boxing.
A broken elbow from slipping on some mud, trying to get fit to go back boxing.
Several torn muscles from trying to get fit to go back to boxing.
Partially torn Achilles in my last bid to get boxing.
I left boxing, then I had the following:
Torn hamstring suffered 2 minutes in to my Rugby 2nd Team debut.
Torn hamstring suffered in my first training session back after the hamstring.
3 broken fingers suffered in a tackle. (Pulled the blokes shorts down, I deserved it).
Hernia after being taken out by a back.
So, really, I've been a burden to the NHS - but only by getting fit. Do you know how many injuries or illnesses I've had that I've had to go to the NHS with in the last 12 months when I've done no exercise?
None.
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Friday 21st November 2014 13:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
So, really, I've been a burden to the NHS
You're a disgrace! You should be taxed to the hilt!
I'm not exactly skinny. I am 6ft 3, and I weigh in at 18st 6. I play Rugby (switch between Prop and Second Row), and before that I used to do Boxing for 10 years
Errr, no, I didn't mean you, sir. I was talking about....about......ermm....that short fat bloke over there.
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Friday 21st November 2014 15:24 GMT Teiwaz
McKinsey Global Group should be included in the own graph.
For producing this steaming pile of wank. Social burden my arse., they're no doubt getting paid from the taxes of people who do something useful all day to come up with this drivel.
Mind you, I actually had to plod through the local Shopping Center today as the out-of-town outlets let me down. Gawds, it was closer to Day of the Living Dead than I remember, a Lot of them looked like denim blamange, but at least they were spending.
Far, Far too many shoe shops too.
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Friday 21st November 2014 15:50 GMT NotWorkAdmin
Smoker? Sure.
And pretty sick of being told I'm a burden to society and/or the NHS. This is untrue. My ridiculously overpriced habit more than compensates for any cost via it's extreme taxation. Couple that with the favour I'm dong the NHS by ensuring I don't get to 80 and cost them a fortune at that stage.
Not to mention the diabolical situation whereby I have to buy them at the same sales point as lottery tickets. I'm absolutely sick of queuing for 10 minutes to get a packet of smokes while having to listen to retards discussing whether they will or will not quit their jobs when they win the bloody lottery.
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Friday 21st November 2014 17:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Smoker? Sure.
So why exactly do you persist in something which may kill you slowly and painfully?
Incidentally my father was persuaded to give up by his GP. At the time he didn't see the point because he expected to die of a heart attack like so many people he knew. Now at over 90 he is still walking to the shops, costs the NHS very little - he has not had to have an overnight stay in hospital in over 30 years - and has good quality of life.
Unless you know for certain you are going to die prematurely of something else, smoking really is a mug's game.
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Friday 21st November 2014 16:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
but of course the sacred cows left untouched.
they wouldn't dare list "high birth rate" for couples and individuals responsible for live birth numbers exceeding a couple's replacement by 4X or higher.
Population, and population density, are the root problem that needs to be addressed.
Develop a highly effective (even 60% or barely effective) airborne contraceptive spray and dose the world for a few months.
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Friday 21st November 2014 18:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Fat people cost money?
This always makes me laugh when people complain about us fatties.
I'm 5"11 (Yes, I'm also a shorty laugh it off) and weigh 16st dead on, have done for years. I dropped to 13st once, but that was due to only eating once every couple of days at one point due to being told not to eat so much.
Contrary to popular belief, I only eat twice a day, I have a bowl of shreddies in the morning at 6am, and a microwave meal for dinner at 8pm.
That's it, I don't have sweets or other junk in between (I don't get time frankly).
My cost on NHS? Zilch, I am on the "Do Not Resuscitate" list, I actively refuse to go to any hospital or doctor regardless of the condition at hand, heck when I broke my wrist recently, I did not go to hospital or doctors, I simply bandaged it myself and took a few painkillers.
Yet routinely I hear this crap about I should eat less, or I should stop costing the gov so much money blah blah.
But the fact is, I cost your society less than you do!
Heck I've never even claimed benefits, not once.
I try eating less, but if I don't eat I get light headed, I always try to wait until that happens before eating but the fact is, if I don't eat I'd probably die.
I've literally passed out from not eating before.
So do me a favour, stop trying to tell me what to do.
(I don't smoke and I'm not an alcoholic either)
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Friday 21st November 2014 18:30 GMT WatAWorld
How short the memories of main stream journalists are, they've forgotten already.
The sad fact is that the few peer reviewed studies show that the optimum weight for middle-aged and older adults is an "overweight BMI", that "normal BMI" is as bad for life expectancy as a "Grade I Obesity BMI" and that being underweight is as bad as having a "Grade II Obesity BMI".
Much of the mainstream press even covered these Australian studies (done on regular Australians, not famine victims).
But how short the memories of main stream journalists are, they've forgotten already.
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Friday 21st November 2014 19:00 GMT PaulR79
Best reason to diet yet
" subjects in the former, heftier band actually lived longer than the lightweights."
I don't want to be at the stage in life where I'm essentially an old baby needing people to wipe my bum, feed me and put me to bed. This could be the reason to finally start losing the excess weight I've been carrying around.
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Saturday 22nd November 2014 05:41 GMT DocJames
BMI is perfectly good as a population measure of obesity (or lack thereof). Unless the average person is close to spherical, cubing height does not make sense. It reflects population mortality stats, but is inaccurate at a personal level (or at least, not conclusive).
Much like reducing salt intake - mentioned in a post above. You can drop your BP by around 2/1mmHg - yes, systolic by about two and diastolic by about one. Completely irrelevant for individuals. This is fantastic on a population level however, as you'll shift the entire bell curve *just a little bit* and have dramatic effects on stroke (very expensive) and heart disease (also expensive).
This data is unsurprising given what they are trying to show. They're looking at economic activity. This is driven by the Western world, as that's where the GDP is. Terrorism is not a big problem (despite the media/political hype). Obesity is.
And finally, will everyone stop pretending that smokers cost less as they die earlier? They shift their health care costs, but do not remove them. They also reduce their lifetime work - mainly by dying. 90% of health care costs are said to occur in the 18 months before death, at any age. Certainly the frail 90 year olds I see have had little to no health care before the age of 80... whereas the 60 year olds often have significant illnesses that have been going on for some time.
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Monday 24th November 2014 08:53 GMT grumpy feline
It's about tax
McKinsey are about marketing (and arse-covering), and politics is marketing (and arse covering).
So what they are saying is that politicians can make a case for taxing fat people etc, and the anceint voters will nod and agree, irrespective of the underlying facts, with little risk of burned backsides.
Indeed the whole point is that the argument can be won in the face of facts. Such is the devilry on display here. Nice innit?
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Tuesday 25th November 2014 07:59 GMT Wzrd1
Obesity is a medical term that has moved quite far from BMI nonsense
Moderate obesity has increased risk of diabetes and atherosclerosis. Severe to morbidly obesity have tremendous risks of both diseases and more.
So, how does this come into giving some credence to what was written in the pseudo-study?
Diabetes is expensive to treat and decline is either rapid or gradual, depending on glycemic control. Arterial disease is also expensive to treat and decline is equally variable, but metrics on efficacy are not especially great for various controls.
That all said, something will always kill us, something will always e expensive to treat. Well, at least until we develop some kind of post scarcity society. I predict one chance of three of that happening, slim chance, fat chance and no chance.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
