Chubby Chinese students refused top bunk The great war against the big-bellied is well under way in China, with certain uni students at a hall of residence told to bed down in the bottom bunks to avoid potential damage caused by falling fatties. Young scholars at the Hohai University, Changzhou campus in Jiangsu Province with a Body Mass Index of 28 or above or who …
Chinese drinking culture is very different to the UK. Most drinking is done in restaurants and KTV, and although there's plenty of dirt cheap alcohol around, being a student is serious business in China, so you'll see little drinking, and no drunkenness on campus.
Dorms are shared and single gender, with little guard huts in front of them. All urban Chinese housing is arrange in little gated communities, so the university is just a microcosm of this.
I did in fact subtly ask a female student how this worked, and she assured me it wasn't an impediment to "student life".
Take that mental image of drunken millennial wastrels partying in the University club, then missing their morning lecture for their useless degree. None of that resembles a Chinese university in any way. It's a totally different culture.
I put on 5Kg after having a tumour removed (going from fairly active to six weeks bed rest over Christmas) and then put on another 15kgs in the first month of chemo (it's not suppose to damage thyroids or affect other hormones, heart, blood pressure, nervous system or brain etc etc but hey, black swan me). Wonder which side of the line I would fall on now with this NHS policy.
What happens when/if someone forced to the bottom bunk slims down to the point where they no longer qualify for such treatment?
Why should a tall person be forced to the bottom bunk if their BMI doesn't make them unhealthy? Tallness is not a detriment to survival unless you live in a ceiling fan manufacturing shop.
BMI is a bit crude, e.g. incorrectly flags you as a bloater if you are very muscly
Can't really beat simple "pinch tests" to give a quick & easy estimate of actual flabbiness, simple way to detect someone false flagged by flawed BMI.
Although smoking and being too fat can badly affect your health, with holding treatment because of lifestyle choices is the start of a slippery slope & not a good idea.
The Simpsons covered this topic. Well, they crushed it, pretty much.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQXzOE12xuM)
"High BMI is a bit crude"
BMI is a terrible measurement. It was development almost 200 years ago, it keeps being debunked as medically deficient, there are many better measurements and yet for some reason the NHS still use it as the primary measurement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Limitations.
When are we going to move on?
Yes, it is in fact not strict enough...I assume you have a specific protest or are a body builder?
Recent data suggests that as little as 0.6g too much on your pancreas. So perhaps fat distribution is the problem? That would be one in the "genetics" camp!
The problem with all metrics is that they need to apply to a population - and there is a prevalent dogma that as you age you get fat, rather than calorific overload and being fat. So we have obese teenagers now, that skew the population 30 years from now. So what is the right number?
Perhaps we should all use VO2max in combination with some other metric?
Then we could calculate "percentage of metabolic load required to maintain unused tissue", because it's all down to physics. If your mitochondrion cannot produce the energy, you are dead...
Beer Icon. A much misunderstood food...
P.
This policy gives new meaning to the term Large and in charge.
BTW, how come a university in China is using bunk beds? Is it that bad, economically, or is it because of something else? And if so, what would that be?
Maybe, it's what the students are accustomed to at home? Could it be the Chinese culture favors bunk beds for young adults? Are Uni students not considered adults yet?
I wonder if higher education is thought of as similar to a military stint? Then bunk beds would fit right in. But no military worth anything would allow fatties to exist in their ranks. Not for long, anyway, once the drill officer has had a little talk with them.
Vast majority of the dorms in the US use bunk beds as well. Even Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCB, pretty much any big-name college uses them. Fraternities / Sororities, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly single-occupancy rooms. Elitism in the US is prevalent everywhere, more so in areas where everyone is supposed to be equal.
I have not spent a hell of a lot of time in US dorms since I was in college, and am not likely to, now that I'm out of the business of turning up (or not) for parents' weekends. But I don't remember seeing bunk beds in dorms at the handful of schools I've attended or visited.
In most residential High Schools or Universities, students stay in "dormitories" that are not like the ones that we might think of in the west. In China, they are like medium-sized bedrooms, but stuffed full of bunk beds - often 8 people per room, but sometimes 6. Students just get used to the lack of privacy and other things - they seem like fire hazards, but this is partially dealt with by limiting use of electricity, sometimes switching off the electricity supply at 23:30 each night, and having people who inspect the rooms - it's a bit like a quasi-military set up, but with less insistence on tidiness. Showers are often communal and in different buildings all together.
In my 5 years in China, teaching there at High School and university level, I saw slight changes to what we in the west would see as being more acceptable, but it is very slow. Foreign students are almost always housed in more luxurious places, barred to Chinese students, and more in keeping with Western Standards.
Considering the safety of Chinese construction, this is probably going to save the lives of quite a few skinny little guys on bottom bunks when the top bunk comes down hard with Chairman Mao on top.
Hell, this has certainly already happened if they're actually making and enforcing rules about it - easier to do that than to build safe bunks. And the fact that they actually care means that at least one of those dead skinny guys was the son of someone with good political connections.
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