BMI: The Lie That Keeps on Giving, and Giving, and Giving....

[I originally posted the following almost five years ago. There's not a word of it I'd retract. Enjoy]

Junk science fads come and go. This particular piece of trash is linked over at Hugh Hewitt's blog.

It is a pretty snazzy presentation purporting to document an "obesity epidemic" based solely on the rediculous statistic known as "Body Mass Index" or BMI. According to Mark Twain there are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics. BMI is the latter two.

BMI is a ratio of Mass to the square of Height done in [of course] SI "units" kg/meter^2. That's all it is, Mass over Area. What does that tell us about obesity? Nothing at all. Really, it makes no discrimination between fat mass and non-fat mass. Someone please explain to me how a statistic that contains zero information about the subject's quantity of body fat can be used to deduce obesity? [Don't bother, that's rhetorical.]

Let me give you an example: when Arnold won Mr. Universe he was 6'0" tall, weighed in at roughly 225 lbs. and had approximately 4% body fat. That gives him a BMI of 30.5 at the time. Was he obese? According to the proponents of BMI, emphatically YES.

See the disconnect? Ever seen the Odessa/Permian football team? Guess what? Every strapping young man in their entire line count in the alleged "obesity epidemic". I call shenanigans!

I forgive Hugh for not being a scientist, but enough with this horse dung already. It doesn't take a professional medical researcher to see what a crock it is as an obesity statistic.

The obesity crisis has become the bandwagon for people who expect the government research grant spigot to be open wide over their mouths. Worst of all there are some who use this debate to advocate that the government impose fad pseudo-science "healthy eating" uniformly across our society. Such authoritarianism goes hand in glove with socialised medicine.

Such advocates are happy to blur the reality with misleading statistics because if they didn't they couldn't credibly claim any kind of emergency (national or otherwise) exists.