If you’ve glanced at a newspaper in the last few months you’ll have noticed that obesity is public health enemy number one. The Guardian has a special section devoted to it – seriously. Its mantra is: ‘Britain is in the grip of an obesity crisis.’ In 2007 the National Obesity Forum issued a report which predicted that half of the population will be obese by 2050; now they are saying that was an underestimate.
That’s all well and good, but it’s not much use knowing that we’re in the midst of an epidemic if the tools we use to diagnose obesity aren’t up to scratch. Everyone knows about the BMI (body mass index) measurement but, as my colleague Christopher Snowden points out, BMI is a pretty crude concept: invented in the 1840s, it’s calculated by dividing a person’s height by their weight.
BMI doesn’t tell you anything about a measurement that really matters – your waistline.
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