chickenfeet

itchyfidget was ranting earlier about poppies and childrens' charities and such. I thought of hijacking her LJ for my rant but that didn't seem quite right so here is my own personal "charity rant".

I really resent getting slick mailshots from teaching hospital foundations. It's not just that the likes of the Hospital for Sick Children and the Princess Margaret Hospital are the best funded bits of the entire health system. It's not even that they consistently blackmail any government that demands any kind of accountability for the huge amounts of taxpayers' money they spend. I can even tolerate the 25% or so of the money raised that's going to end up paying for the president of the fund raising company's mansion in Rosedale. What I absolutely will not do is treat as a charity an organisation whose CEO "earns" $700,000 per year and has 97 VPs of administration, all making $300,000, but which wants all its nurses to be part time casual to save a few bucks. Give me a fucking break!

I'm overweight but not by much. I weigh 213 pounds which at just over 6 feet tall gives me a BMI of 28.5. I would like to be 200 pounds (BMI=26.7) which would apparently make me still overweight. Frankly this is nuts. I was 200 pounds when I was playing rugby competitively and was as fit as I've ever been in my life. It's not like I'm unfit now. I've run 25km in the last four days which is more than a lot of people do in a year. What's really scary is that according to the BMI calculation I could be 140 pounds and still be a healthy weight! When I was ill about ten years ago I dropped to 155 pounds and I looked horrible, all skin and bone, and not in the least healthy.

So let's look at this in the context of the "obesity epidemic". It's trivially obvious that the BMI statistic exaggerates obesity among tall people and does the opposite for short people (weight, other things being equal, is proportional to the cube of body weight rather than being linear). It's a fact that in the developed world average height has been increasing for at least a hundred years. This of course means that obesity statistics based on BMI will get worse even if nothing is happening! I'm not saying there isn't a problem but it is being exaggerated by the use of a very dubious statistic.