No Proof we are the fattest in the world.
June 25, 2008
AUSTRALIA may be fat, and getting fatter, but there is no evidence that it is the fattest country in the world - contrary to a blizzard of recent media reports warning the country is a ticking “fat bomb” about to explode.
Within hours of launching its biennial snapshot report on the nation’s health yesterday, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare issued a statement saying it “did not know of any reliable statistics that would support the claim that we were worse than all other countries”.
Many news services, including The Australian, reported last week that this country had become the world’s most overweight nation, after a report by the Melbourne-based Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute claimed that “almost four million adult Australians are currently obese”.
The report claimed this would result in an extra 700,000 hospital admissions in the next 20 years, costing an extra $6 billion.
But yesterday, AIHW director Penny Allbon said the methods by which those estimates were derived could not be supported by existing evidence.
The Australia’s Health report showed that 19 per cent of males and 17 per cent of females qualified as obese, equivalent to 2.5million people, Dr Allbon said. If the much larger category of overweight people were included, that amounted to 7.4 million people. “So it’s high, but it still doesn’t make us the fattest in the world,” she said.
“We do know that Australians have been gradually getting fatter over at least the last 20 years.
“The most recent data that we have that tells us about the population is the 2004-05 health survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. At the moment the ABS is out there measuring height and weight in a population-based survey, so we don’t know the results.
“We were just a bit concerned that the statistics that came out about us being the fattest in the world is not based on a population survey.”
The Baker’s results were based on measurements of people at 100 sites around the country, which the AIHW said might not have given a representative sample of the population.
The Australia’s Health report said close to three in 10 children were either overweight or obese.
Tony Hobbs, a GP in the southeastern NSW town of Cootamundra and chairman of the Australian General Practice Network, said people “don’t need to get carried away” making international comparisons that might mean little.
“I think it’s important we worry about our own population, and the other illnesses obesity will drive - and look at a way to engage obese people so we can help them,” he said. “We can get distracted by international comparisons.”
Source- http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23918332-23289,00.html
Posted in Article, Odds & Ends, Weight Loss & Exercise 
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I will give this months weigh in a miss and update the figures next month on the 10th. Sorry folks.
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