A massive coalition of health organizations run by some of the brightest minds in the American medical world conspired recently to define you and me and so many millions of us as fat. Obese, if we want to get technical about it.
A new definition of obesity just upped America’s obesity rate from 42.9 percent to a laughably large 68.6 percent, and all without a single person gaining a pound.
According to a new study published in JAMA Network Open, most of us are fatter than we thought. But a new major factor in our weight problems is a little bit more than the fat itself, but about where it’s positioned on your body.
Led by Dr. Lindsay Fourman at Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers pored over health data from over 300,000 Americans as part of the All of Us research program. What they found was that belly fat was a much stronger predictor of health issues than BMI alone. And yet, under the old system, tens of thousands of people with “normal” BMIs and dangerous fat distribution patterns flew under the radar.
The new definition, backed by the Lancet Commission and 76 major medical organizations, throws out the idea that BMI alone can sum up your entire health. Instead, it incorporates waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, and waist-to-height ratio to paint a fuller, fatter picture of rapidly expanding American waistlines.
There’s a massive category of Americans living with what the study calls “anthropometric-only obesity,” which is folks whose scales say they’re at an acceptable weight for their age and height, but their torsos argue otherwise. These people were found to have a significantly higher risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, and organ problems, despite not “looking” obese on paper.
Age, gender, and race all factor into it. Seniors saw the biggest reclassification. Over 78 percent of them now meet the criteria for obesity under the new rules. Asian Americans experienced the steepest increase in diagnoses, and men were more likely than women to carry this newly defined risk.
If you truly want to be healthy, it’s not good enough to suffer the slings and arrows of your bathroom scale; now you must suffer the indignity of being tape-measured like a horse at auction, only to be told that even though you hit all the required numerical criteria, you’re still too fat to live. Thank you, medical science, for making millions of Americans suddenly feel so much worse about themselves in one fell swoop.
The post Americans Got Fatter Overnight Thanks to the New Definition of Obesity appeared first on VICE.
