Obesity

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Shortcomings of the Body Mass Index (BMI)

I have been meaning to write about this topic for a while, and now I have Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump to thank for spurring me to doing so. In case you missed it (or you’ve forgotten because the news moves so quickly), last week Pelosi said that she wished Trump would refrain from taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against COVID-19, which he had been doing for more than a week. Pelosi’s comments revolved around the lack of scientific evidence of the drug’s efficacy, and that fact that it appears to be harmful. Her apparent concern was followed by some not very subtle backhanded comments, adding that Trump was at heightened risk for drug complications due to: “his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group – morbidly obese, they say. So, I think it’s not a good idea.”

Weight is a sensitive topic. Pelosi’s comments were seen by some as justified comeuppance, since Trump has an expansive history of insulting people, but they were more widely panned as fat-shaming. Still others, such as CNN Political reporter Chris Cillizza, wondered whether Trump really was in fact “morbidly obese” by looking at CDC guidelines on the body mass index (BMI).

There are certainly more important things going on in the world right now than worrying about weight or BMI. Still, there is some evidence that people in higher-income countries under lockdown are gaining weight – the so-called “quarantine 15” – while people in lower-income countries are at higher risk for famine. As someone who has used BMI in research, I’d like to focus on its uses and some of its shortcomings, as well as the potential stigmatizing effects of labeling people by BMI categories.

BMI is used by an array of health professionals – physicians, nutritionists, epidemiologists, humanitarian aid workers – as a screening tool for people who might be under- or over-weight, as a warning for potential health problems. One of the reasons BMI is so widely used is its simplicity. All you need are two measurements: height (in meters) and weight (in kilograms), which are then plugged into the formula kg/ m2. And, unlike other more direct ways of assessing body composition, such as skinfolds, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, or underwater weighing, BMI can be ascertained with just a scale and a stadiometer. This makes BMI a cheap method that requires minimal training. This also makes BMI a portable, field-friendly method for researchers (including biological anthropologists) working with people who live in a range of environments.

Categorizing People by BMI

A higher BMI is suggestive of higher body fat, which is a risk factor for various morbidities including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. For that reason, health organizations such as the CDC use rough categories to ascertain who might be at risk for elevated body fat (or adiposity). In adults, “absolute” cutoffs for categorizing adults are recommended:

  • Underweight – below 18.5 kg/m2
  • Normal or healthy – 18.5 to 24.9 kg/m2
  • Overweight – 25.0 to 29.9 kg/m2
  • Obese – 30 kg/m2 or higher
    • Class 1 Obesity – 30 to 34.9 kg/m2 
    • Class 2 Obesity – 35 to 39.9 kg/m2 
    • Class 3 Obesity – 40 kg/m2

If you know your height and weight, there are simple ways of finding your BMI if you don’t have a calculator handy, such as this site. Or, you may have seen a chart like this before.

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How War Gets Under Our Skin

beinghuman.org front page

I wrote this piece on BeingHuman.org about how war (and the world in general) gets under our skin. It looks at the Hmong example, as well as examples from a few other wars around the world (the Dutch Hunger Winter, the Biafran famine, and the Khmer Rouge period), and how these experiences get into our bodies. 

 

http://www.beinghuman.org/article/how-world-gets-under-our-skin

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Unbending rigor is the mate of death,
And wielding softness the company of life:
Unbending soldiers get no victories;
The stiffest tree is readiest for the axe.
Tao Te Ching: 76

 

Early in life, our bodies are like unmolded clay, ready to be shaped by our experiences. For some of us, that matching process can create problems. If circumstances change, we could end up poorly adapted to our adult environment. A child born into harsh conditions, though, may have to take that risk in order to make it to adulthood at all.

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Inequality, Health Disparities, & Obesity

An October poll of 1,000 likely voters found that Americans are increasingly concerned about income inequality. When asked: “How Big a Problem is Income Inequality in the US?,” the majority (74%) replied that it was either a big problem or somewhat of a problem. Predictably, there were differences in opinion by political ideology, but a majority of liberals (94%), moderates (81%), and conservatives (55%) answered that inequality was at least somewhat problematic. However, as is true of many polls, it was not specified exactly what people found unsettling about it. I suppose there are many reasons that people might find increasing inequality (and climbing rates of poverty) to be troubling, but I wanted to focus here on inequality and health, particularly on obesity.

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First, what do we mean by poverty? I remember watching an interview on PBS with the economist Jeffrey Sachs years ago (transcript here – thank you, Google), where he distinguished between two types of poverty. The first was an extreme form, which he called the type of “poverty that kills.” The other type was more of a poverty of inconvenience or jealousy. I don’t want to over-interpret Sachs’ meaning. It was a passing phrase in an interview from ten years ago, and his primary focus was on alleviating the extreme poverty faced by more than a billion people in the world living on $1 per day (see Sachs 2005). Elsewhere, Sachs has lamented that the media have ignored poverty in the United States at a time when “the U.S. has the greatest income inequality, highest per capita prison population and worst health conditions of all high-income countries.” His credentials in fighting poverty are unassailable. But I cite the old interview here because I think his descriptions (‘poverty that kills’ vs. ‘poverty of jealousy’) might resonate with many people today, and not necessarily in a good way.

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Extreme poverty: scavenging at a garbage dump in Phnom Penh (abcnews)

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Choice, Obesity & the Irrational Ape (Homo insensatus)

“What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.”

……………………………………………………………………………………. – Albert Einstein

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Another irrational ape (imitating Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’)

Jonah Lehrer has written another great piece about our irrationality in decision making, and our emotional responses to avoiding loss. He writes:

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From the perspective of economics, there is no good reason to weight gains and losses so differently. Opportunity costs (foregone gains) should be treated just like “out-of-pocket costs” (losses). But they aren’t – losses carry a particular emotional sting.”

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Others have noted the importance of emotion involved in decision making, and how it affects our ability to intuit how our choices will make us feel. When someone suffers damage to the prefrontal cortex of their brain, both their emotions and decision-making abilities are impaired (Bechara et al 1997). What this suggests is that emotions and reason are linked, rather than oppositional. They inform each other. This all fits in with Dan Ariely’s view of humans as “predictably irrational.”

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Inequality, Evolution & Obesity

A recent study on child obesity by researchers at Harvard has received a good deal of media attention lately. In the NY Times, a synopsis of the study was one of the most emailed articles in the country (“Baby Fat May Not Be So Cute After All,” March 22). The key sentence from that article:

“More and more evidence points to pivotal events very early in life — during the toddler years, infancy and even before birth, in the womb — that can set young children on an obesity trajectory that is hard to alter by the time they’re in kindergarten.”


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