I was not referring to BMI.
I too think BMI is overly simplistic.
I was referring to fat as a % of body size, and you need not look far to see some very unhealthy people.
Bad nourishment is a very real problem in the industrialised countries, whereas in less well developed countries the problem is more mal nourishment.
There is plenty of food in, for example, the UK, and most of it is, for lack of a better word, pretty shit -here meaning not good for the body.
Now alot of this stuff is goddamed tasty though. I still have a weakness for things like KFC etc, which even as you bite into that delicious crunchiness, you know it is not doing you any favours.
“Junk” food (e.g. KFC) is the most obvious culprit (most visible, easiest to complain about, and to a degree easiest to combat on a personal level - i.e. just don’t go there!) but there is, imho (because I haven’t measured it!) a bigger problem in the form of contaminated food chains.
Perhaps contaminated is the wrong word, as that means things like sewage contaminating a swimming pool, but the food chain is massively industrialised, which means things like over use of fertiliser, denuding of the soil, force feeding of animals and mass production of animals. Chickens are the best (worst?) example because they can grow very quickly and can be intensely reared on small spaces, e.g. battery farms in barns, much quicker and easier than, says, ducks or geese for example (and yes, I am aware of the foie gras controversy, but I am referring to scale here) and thus, chicken in the supermarket is incredibly cheap, and, again, path of least resistance (plus marketing, plus a general decline in know how regarding produce) means that cheap chicken (or pork, or beef etc) sells.
That’s surely not a controversial statement.
There was an earlier conversation somewhere on this forum where people were comparing the price of buying McDonald’s every day versus making it yourself.
Now the pricwe of such cheap food is a lack of quality, by which I measn nutritional density.
By way of anecdata, when I was a child, in Kenya, industrial scale food production wasn’t really a thing, and stuff like breakfast cereal was a treat.
WE got all our meat from a Butcher we walked to about 2 or 3 miles away. Our milk was from a neighbours cow, and our veggies from a stall near the neighbour.
WE also didn’t have alot of food, because I remember that stuff being expensive.
I knew 2 fat people at school as a child and yes they were bullied mercilessly, but so was I, and so were most people, shrugs.
Nowadays, nearly every kid I see in school, in England, is pudgy at the least, and excess fat is the new normal.
And I don’t see how that can be a good thing for a nation.
Now fat shaming is not the solution, the solution, imho, is to target those paths of least resistance.
