What physical feats should every man be able to do?

Oh I didn't know. I'm not familiar with Wii fit.

 

I just used it as a generic really, maybe I should have been clearer and said maybe a yoga dvd once a week or something, I know how long hours can shatter you and stress does build up.

 

But you make that choice. If you came out and said, "I don't have time to exercise", I'd likely berate you as being full of it.

But they do have the time, that's my point. If they make a choice that they aren't going to exercise because they don't want to. Fine. But I cant stand people crying about not having time, when they plainly do.

You've obviously not met many parents. I know several families where the children get fed fast food 2/3/4 evenings a week.

Childhood obesity has skyrocketed over the last couple of decades. If all parents (or even most parents) were responsible in what they feed their children, that wouldn't be the case.

Yeah, all that time sitting together in front of the TV eating microwaved food. Real quality time there.

Erm no. The clue is in the title overweight.

I'm not expecting people to meet my standards. I'm expecting people to choose whether they look after themselves or not and not use their children/job/social life as an excuse.

I have three younger siblings, two of them much younger. I fully remember their upbringing in a working class home. I understand exactly how much work my parents have put in and continue to put in. But thanks for trying to discredit my argument through assumptions about my life.

 

Anyone who thinks stretching isn't strenuous hasn't tried my new isometric progression plan. :evil:

 

But isn't that exactly what you are doing here? You're assuming all (or most) parents have the faults of the worst of them, and trying to discredit the statement "I don't have enough time" using the faults of the few.

 

From 2008, in England, 65.9% of Men and 56.9% of women were overweight or obese. This was based on BMI, which is a flawed measure, but I think it illustrates the scale of the issue. That's most people. It's not just parents, it's just parents who are the biggest player of the time card.

But let's consider parents for a moment.

In 2004, over 30% of children aged 7-11 were overweight including ~10% obese. If your child is obese, the overwhelming likelihood is, you're a bad parent.

ZOMG - he didn't just say that, did he?
Yes, Mable, yes I did. If you care so little about your child's life as to allow little Johnny to make it all the way to obesity, then you are a bad parent. And the majority of the remaining 20% in the overweight category receive bad parenting certificates too.

 

BMI is an incredibly flawed measure. Can we agree that and get it out of the way early? If you deviate by more than an inch or two from the average height, you're almost guaranteed to be over or underweight according to BMI. So no, it doesn't illustrate the scale of the issue, as the majority of people are not 'average'.

You said overweight originally, not obese. They are different things.

Obesity, maybe, though I do think you're displaying a massive prejudice and ignorance here. Of course part of the reason I see better parenting (on average) than you do may be to do with the areas in which we both live. It's long been known that diet is much less healthy in the north of the country rather than the south.

 

I agree it is a poor measure, but I doubt more that 10% of the population are falsely categorised as overweight on the BMI scale, since it mainly affects people who are carrying a much greater than average amount of muscle. Even so, I think it is fair to say that half the population of this country currently weighs more than is healthy.

They are different degrees of the same thing.

Oh absolutely! I am totally prejudiced against the parents of fat children.
No one's perfect, not even I.

 

The very methodology of the measure is flawed - it works only for those who are close to the 'average' height as defined by BMI. Since height is increasing over time, BMI grows more and more misleading.

The flaws have nothing to do with carrying a greater than average amount of muscle, it's to do with a complete failure to account for the dimensions of the human body.

The BMI model identifies me as being on the border of overweight, yet I'm much healthier than the average. My sister, meanwhile, is identified as being severely underweight (she's 5') and is in a better state of health than me. My mother is identified as underweight (again, 5') and is in a very good state of health for her age while my father is identified as overweight, regularly runs 10+ miles each day and goes for 40 mile cycle rides several times a week.

So since you're basing your claims of bad parents purely on anecdotal evidence, I'd love to see your arguments against these examples.

Sort of - one's a health risk, one's not according to the model. In fact some studies have shown that fit people classified as overweight are at lower risks than fit people who're underweight, or in the ideal band. The artificial cut-off is ridiculous and the BMI model should be scrapped and replaced with something more suited to dealing with real humans.

Trying to get everyone to fit some specified ideal based on a flawed model is much, much worse than simply looking at individual fitness.

It's more that you're tarring all parents with the same brush, claiming that a third of parents are bad parents.

 

Ok, one thing at a time.

Fit people can measure as overweight on a BMI test, this is well known, but the percentage of people this affects will be fairly low. BMI can also fail to provide an accurate picture for people with slightly atypical body shapes - again probably a fairly small percentage of the population.

It is not surprising that some very healthy people fall off the other end of the spectrum and read as underweight. If I have to explain why this is unsurprising, I recommend we pick up this discussion once you've read a book or two on human biology.

I'm certainly not suggesting that every child who is a lb or 2 overweight on the BMI scale is being abused with food by his parents, but no child who is assessed as very overweight or obese can use the same excuse as adults, since 11 year old children do not typically pile on muscle mass.

If BMI were replaced by a more reliable measure, I'd be happy to revisit this discussion, but I think you'd be surprised by how little the statistics change (since if healthy slender kids can read as overweight, unhealthy fat kids can read as normal weight).

I'm making generalisations because that's all I can make. I can hardly go up to the parent of every Augustus Gloop and ask them if I can subject their child to a bleep test so I know if he is being abused.

 

Addendum: BMI as an indicator of excess adiposity in children: ~70-80% sensitivity, 95% specificity.

Good enough, I'd say,

http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?id=47890

 

I wouldn't.

That would mean that 1 in 5 will be false negatives, while 1 in 20 are false positives.

So if we take a sample of 100 children, 30 will not be picked up by the test by being at risk, while 5 will be told they are overweight when they are not.

Definitely not good enough, and I'd like more detail on their numbers and the actual statistical analysis. They're also not clarifying on how well it predicts weight gain carrying on into later age. Children do gain puppy fat, and they do have growth spurts, both of which will throw off the BMI model. They do say that children with a high BMI are more likely to grow into obese adults, but not what proportion of such children do so.

If this were a test for disease it wouldn't be in use.

 

BMI is indeed pure poo. I am classified as moderately underweight.Haha, I wish, if I were underweight I wouldn't be hemorrhaging right now.

Better to just look at body fat percentage.

 

So, BMI incorrectly assesses 5% of children as overweight and you think that is bad, considering how it is calculated?

Your argument was that BMI placed too many children in the overweight class. That paper shows that only 5% are false positives. That is more than accurate enough for the purposes of my argument.

 

Yes, I do think a false positive rate of 5% is bad. Although actually it's more like an 8% false positive rate. If we take your figure that 30% are obese, then the false positives are taken from among the healthy and underweight portions - which makes it approximately 8% of them who are detected.

In fact the false positive is most likely higher, as I suspect only children with 'healthy' bodyweights fall into the false positive band, underweight subjects are unlikely to detect as such. So we've then got maybe a 10-15% failure.

Not only that, but that's only looking at the false positives and negatives for overweight - underweight isn't mentioned, but the figures would most likely be similar. That then gives us a ridiculously high failure rate of a test which many people seem to take as holy gospel.

And I still want to see their statistics on BMI as a predictor.

 

Yeah BMI seems to operate on the premise that people are all the same in body dimensions. If you're very fine boned, or very heavily built with normal body fat, you get a distorted reading.

Why not just use body fat percentage as a health measure? Overfat is overfat no matter how tall you are or what body shape.

 

Still fine for my point. My point was never about the accuracy of BMI, rather that even accounting for the inaccuracy, a non desirable proportion of the population are overweight.

No, that's not what the study was looking at. It was 5% on a test for excess adiposity.

I've not been talking about underweight. I've been talking about overweight.

Link to full paper was on the site I referenced.

 

Most cost-effective body fat measurements have very high errors (>20%). There may be studies out there which have used accurate BF% measurements, but I don't have the inclination to go searching at the moment.

 

Which is absolutely fine until you look at the severe damage it can do in individual cases.

Over what weight exactly? Seeing as overweight is defined as being above a certain bound set arbitrarily, can you please clear up for me exactly when one becomes overweight rather than healthy? By the BMI measure, which is flawed, or when the excess weight affects someone's health?

If it's the health one you'll find that fitness is much, much more important than weight, and that in fact weight as such has minimal impact on morbidity where someone is fit.

I'm aware of that, but given that excess adiposity refers to excess fat (as arbitrarily defined, again) and we're talking about health in general, added to the fact that having too little fat is also unhealthy, it's reasonable to make the assumption that the errors in the model are reflected to the underweight.

I'm talking about health in general.

Yep, just found it and noticed something.

The study found that BMI was moderately useful for those in the 95th percentile and above of the population studied. That'd mean that their results apply only to the top 5 percentiles in terms of weight - the heaviest, most extremely overweight kids can only expect the poor results we discussed above from BMI.

So, for the top 5 percentiles of the population looked at, BMI was capable of placing about 75% of them in the correct category. That's pretty pitiful.

The paper then also states that for adults BMI is about 75% accurate - so 25% of the population are innaccurately assessed by the model. The breakdown of this is not given but assuming an even spread it would be fair to guess that the innaccuracy is more likely to affect the majority (not-overweight) than the minority (overweight).

Yep, not seeing anything to defend BMI there.

 

A 20% error in measurement of body fat is less serious than the errors in BMI - particularly as those errors will be in data collection, and repeated measurements will narrow them whereas the errors in BMI are systematic.