ON THE first Saturday of this month, World Obesity Day was observed. It was reported that around 27 million Filipinos are considered to be either overweight or, more seriously, obese.
The measurement which is used to define, reportedly by the World Health Organization (WHO), whether somebody is overweight is the ‘body mass index’ (BMI). The BMI is deemed to be the person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of his/her height in meters. A BMI which is over 25 is defined as overweight and over 30 is considered to be obese.
This means if a basketball player who is two meters tall and weighs 100 kilograms, then his BMI is 100 divided by 2×2 which equals 25. Such a person is borderline overweight.
To take a more typical example, a person who is 5 feet 4 inches tall but weights 130 pounds is well within the normal weight for his height.
Nevertheless, a recent survey carried out by Novo Nordisk, a global health care company, found that according to the BMI formula, around 36.6 percent of adult Filipinos aged 20 years or older meet the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria for being either overweight or obese. This is equivalent to around 27 million people.
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Novo Nordisk asserts that these 27 million have a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other (unspecified) chronic diseases.
Clearly, this is a gray area where we do not know, in quantitative terms, the additional risks taken by those who are deemed to be overweight.
The British Medical Association Family Encyclopedia helpfully tells us that the most efficient way to lose weight is to eat less. Sound advice! ‘To lose weight, people should eat 500 to 1,000 calories a day less than their energy requirements. This should result in a weight loss of between 0.5 and 1 kilogram per week until a desirable weight is achieved’. Easier said than done.
More work needs to be carried out so that we can better understand the relationship between our weight and the extent to which our expected longevity is affected.
Some people are clearly underweight. Does this also adversely affect their life expectancy?
We need more rigorous discussion about the relationship between our weight and predictable consequences in terms of the possibility of assessing how long we might live./PN
