BMI measurement-Is it a true universal indication of "healthiness" for all?

Body Mass Index, popularly known as BMI, has been widely used since 1972, after it was coined by the renowned scientist Ancel Keys to assess the health status of human beings using the height and weight parameters. Credit must go to Adolphe Quetelet for inventing the existence of a relationship between body weight, height and health status in 1830 though it was not accepted universally. To day BMI is the golden standard to condemn any person as over weight or obese who are supposed to be more vulnerable to life style diseases like diabetes, CVD, blood pressure etc compared to those with "normal" BMI. This myth is sought to be busted by a recent study by a group of scientists in the US who found out that BMI cannot be relied upon when it comes to assessing the healthiness of an individual and whether the world will accept such a revcolutionary finding remains to be seen. Here is a take on this path breaking development.

"Over the past few years, body mass index (BMI), a ratio of a person's height and weight, has effectively become a proxy for whether a person is considered healthy. However, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), found that using BMI to gauge health incorrectly labels more than 54 million Americans as 'unhealthy', even though they are not. "Many people see obesity as a death sentence. But the data show there are tens of millions of people who are overweight and obese and are perfectly healthy," said lead author A Janet Tomiyama, an assistant professor at UCLA. The scientists analysed the link between BMI — which is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilogrammes by the square of the person's height in metres — and several health markers, including blood pressure and glucose, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, using data from the most recent US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The study found that close to half of Americans who are considered 'overweight' by virtue of their BMIs (47.4 per cent, or 34.4 million people) are healthy, as are 19.8 million who are considered 'obese'. Given their health readings other than BMI, the people in both of those groups would be unlikely to incur higher medical expenses, and it would be unfair to charge them more for health care premiums, Tomiyama said. The researchers also found that more than 30 per cent of those with BMIs in the 'normal' range — about 20.7 million people — are actually unhealthy based on their other health data. About 15 per cent of Americans who are considered "very obese" by virtue of having a BMI of 35 or higher are actually healthy, researchers said."

What is shocking in these findings is that a significant segment of the population who had high BMI beyond the magical figure of 25 were perfectly healthy with no evident disease symptoms while many others with BMI less than 25 were unhealthy as measured by other health parameters. How can the world get reconciled to this contradictory situation when physicians are put into a dilemma to decide millions of cases requiring medical advice on their health status.? Should there be a reconsideration about BMI and its relation to health and is there not a need to evolve a more accurate paradigm in place of BMI? Now that questions have been raised about the reliability of BMI it is time the health and medical community take note of this crucial development and come out soon with their consensus on the issue.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

Prosperity, thy name is "nemesis"-Great food inflicted health crisis staring us!

Umpteen number of treatise emphasize the uncomfortable truth that an average a denizen, living in any part of the globe with high income, consumes a diet that is drastically different from that consumed 50 years ago. The catch here is that the quality of the diet has taken a beating with more and refined foods, low quality carbohydrates, less and less of fibers, fruits and vegetables, more of fats of lower quality, predominating the food that is consumed day in day out. The result is there for every one to see. Diseases like obesity, CVD, blood pressure, diabetes, kidney ailments, liver problems, cancer etc have become common and billions of dollars are being spent to treat them, the only beneficiary being the drug industry. Here is a telling commentary on this vicious situation in a super rich country like the US which is revealing.

"Today, novelty dominates American food. Those yellow arches are now golden arches and we are now a nation addicted to sugar, fat and drive-through windows. Food is mere fuel, and we eat more of it in our family car than at our family table. For proof, look how we — you and me — have changed our food patterns in the last 40 or so years.
• In 1960, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, we spent 26 cents of our food dollar on restaurant meals; in 2013 it was 50 percent.
• In 1950, the standard soft-drink bottle contained 6.5 ounces; in 1960 it grew to 12 ounces and, in the 1990s, 20 ounces became the norm.
• In 1970, according to numbers in a 2011 article published by Grist, the U.S. "churned out 2,168 calories per day per person, 402 of which came from added sugar and 410 from added fat ... or, combined, about 37 percent of the total."
• In 2008, the U.S. produced 2,673 calories per day person (" ... powerful evidence that [America's] cheap food policy ... succeeded ... ") of which "added fats and sugars [grew] to 459 and 641 calories, respectively, a 35 percent jump over the 1970 level ... "
• In 2013, according to Harvard University, Americans spent "an estimated $190 billion treating obesity-related health conditions."
• Also, in 2013, U.S. organic sales (which USDA does not track) totaled an estimated $35.1 billion, an 11.5 percent increase from 2012 but still only 18.4 percent of the amount spent we spent to treat obesity-related health problems that year. 

What's it all mean, fellow foodies? According to that brief survey, most of us ate less sugar and less fat when we ate more fresh, local food at home 40 or 50 years ago than what we buy and eat (mostly) in town today. Also, most of us were skinnier and healthier (as were our parents in comparison to us today) and all of us had more neighbors and more "community" — local banks, medical care, grocery and clothing stores and the like — than almost any of us have anywhere in rural America today. In short, we had it very, very good — despite Grandma pushing the pickle beets and lima beans every chance she got. Little wonder, then, that a new food culture, a foodie culture, is taking root across the U.S. now."

Though the above study, analyzing the hard data is considered reliable, there is no cogent answer as to what can be done to redeem the world from the curse of bad food and distorted food culture which are slowly but surely making the quality of life progressively deteriorating. While many blame the industry for this sorry situation, some blame will have be apportioned to the government regulatory agencies who have allowed this situation to develop by shirking their bounden responsibility to protect the lives of the citizens. Where does the consumer come in this complex scenario? Of course it is the weak will power and weakness for tasty foods abandoning the health concerns (similar to tobacco and alcohol) on the part of the consumer that is driving this insane rush towards health catastrophe staring at them! Unless consumers, regulatory agencies, health experts and the food business get together to deal with the crisis, this sordid "death dance" will continue unabated!

V.H.POTTY

http://vhpotty.blogspot.com

http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

Chickens want to roost!-Poultry industry does not allow!

"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" can be a very comfortable way of living, provided you do not have some thing called conscience! The fact that the world harbors a large number of carnivorous and omnivorous human beings cannot be denied and plant eating population is relatively a minority, We have to live with the custom of killing other animals to meet the insatiable desire for meat foods. Vow, how do we go about it! The inherent demand and potential new demand for chicken meat and related products can be met only by the so called industrial poultry farming where millions of birds are raised under conditions that cannot be called totally acceptable to the conscience of man. There are millions of poultry farms across the world which produce chicken carcasses that is the basis of a roaring international trade. From time to time cases of meat contamination and food poisoning are reported involving large number of recalls from the market. Most consumers are under the impression that chicken preparations they consume whether at home or in eateries come from hospital-like, clean, hygienic farm facilities where the birds enjoy a luxurious comfortable life! Unfortunately the truth is some thing else as revealed by a recent expose which is nauseating and abominable to say the least.  Look at the report more carefully and see whether you can resist throwing up, after watching the scenes in a typical poultry farm in the US.

"Most shocking is that the bellies of nearly all the chickens have lost their feathers and are raw, angry, red flesh. The entire underside of almost every chicken is a huge, continuous bedsore. As a farm boy who raised small flocks of chickens and geese, I never saw anything like that. One reason seems to be modern breeding: Chickens are now bred to have huge breasts, and they often end up too heavy for their legs. Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human would weigh 660 pounds by the age of eight weeks. These chickens don't run around or roost as birds normally do. They stagger a few steps, often on misshapen legs, and then collapse onto the excrement of tens of thousands of previous birds. It is laden with stinging ammonia that seems to eat away at feathers and skin. I called Perdue to see what the company had to say. Jim Perdue declined to comment, but a company spokeswoman, Julie DeYoung, agreed that undersides of chickens shouldn't be weeping red. She suggested that the operator was probably mismanaging the chicken house. That doesn't go over well with Watts, whose family has owned the farm since the 1700s and says he has been raising chickens for Perdue since 1992, meticulously following its requirements. As Watts sees it, Perdue realized that consumers were concerned about animal welfare and food safety, and decided to manipulate the public. The claim about the chickens being raised "cage free" is misleading because birds raised for meat are not in cages. It's egg-laying chickens that are caged, not the ones we eat. So "cage free" is meaningful for eggs but not for chicken meat. Moreover, Perdue's chickens are crammed so tightly in barns that they might as well be in cages. Each bird on the Watts farm gets just two-thirds of a square foot. So why is our government giving its seal of approval to these methods as humane, in ways that seem to mislead consumers? "U.S.D.A. is the accomplice of Perdue in the fooling of consumers," says Leah Garces, American director of Compassion in World Farming, who calls it a marketing scam."

the tragedy is further compounded by the tacit recognition of this by the authorities who are supposed to prevent such animal abuses. Though animal activists and scientific community frown at these malpractices, nothing much is happening to take to task such powerful farmer lobby which is a law unto themselves with no accountability to the feelings and welfare of the consumers who form their "bread and butter". To add insult to injury the industry is brazen enough to proclaim on the product labels that their products are made from birds raised in a humane way!. Greediness for maximizing their profits through increased productivity per farm and minimizing their input cost drive most poultry farmers to use a variety of techniques and chemicals to torture the birds to increase their body weight. If the same techniques are used in man, he will be as heavy as 300 kg within 8 weeks, so say some experts! Every chicken meat consumer must introspect and decide whether he wants to eat meat from such birds! 

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com