166lb? That’s 75 kilos? That can’t be right. Average weight of an Irish woman is 47kg, and they’re talking about Irish obesity becoming a problem. Surely there’s some mistake in the figures.
The body type of the average 19-year-old American woman (with Barbie for comparison):
Yeah, she looks really fat.
Link: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/07/09/barbie-meet-average-barbie/
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Assuming an average height of 5’4" or 162cm, a weight of 47kg would be a BMI of 17.9 … less than 18.5 would be considered underweight.
Median weight (what the average woman weighs) is about 10 pounds less than the average ( http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/Obesity.pdf ), which implies there are less people over the average weight than under it.
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75kg / 27kg/m^2 = 2.77 m^2
2.77 m^2 ^ 0.5 = 1.66 m = 166cm
166cm / 2.54 cm/in = 65.4 in
That’s 5 feet and 5 or 6 inches
The math does not lie
If the average Irish woman weighs 47 kg and they are talking about an obesity problem then something is a bit odd. To be obese at 47 kg by BMI standards (BMI 30) you would have to be 4 foot 1. So let’s say that the average is merely “overweight” (that is, has a higher life expectency than normal) at BMI 26. That would make average height 4 foot 5.
In fact, at 47kg and 5 foot 6 you would have a BMI of 17, which is dangerously underweight and seriously reducing your life expectency. Do you just have your numbers wrong, is Ireland a country of dangerously malnourished people, or does that number include children?
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What are they, twins? Hawt. I’d hit thems.
Oh, but BMI is a proxy for fatness, you know, [insert hand-waving by the medical profession and bariatric industries here]…
(pay no attention to the prejudices and financial interests behind that curtain…)
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You are aware, I hope, that in 1998, the definitions of “overweight” and “obese” were changed to correspond to lower BMIs, with absolutely zero medical evidence for doing so.
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The crazy thing is, the “fat” Barbie looks a lot better to me. The original doll has that extreme bulimic heroin chic look while the fat one looks healthier. Plus, she actually has a butt.
I mean seriously, look at Barbie’s arms. Those would be just skin and bones on a real person, it would not be a good look.
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I had no idea, so I went searching for more information. From [Wikipedia] (Body mass index - Wikipedia):
In 1998, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought U.S. definitions into line with World Health Organization guidelines, lowering the normal/overweight cut-off from BMI 27.8 to BMI 25.
A [Washington Post] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/guideposts/fitness/optimal.htm) article seems to be saying that the number of overweight Americans went from 68 million to 97 million with this change.
The Wikipedia article points out that:
In Singapore, the BMI cut-off figures were revised in 2005, motivated by studies showing that many Asian populations, including Singaporeans, have higher proportion of body fat and increased risk for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes mellitus, compared with Caucasians at the same BMI.
It seems like this is pretty clear evidence about how useless the BMI is for determining health.
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that’s just because weight is heavy-tailed (no pun intended). it’s impossible to be 180# below the median, while it is possible to be 180# above the median. it doesn’t necessarily mean that 1/2 of america is healthy; it’s that some people are very heavy, which increases the mean.
median and mean are each a type of average. i always thought that “average” was a shortening of “à travers-age” which would be sort of pidgin French for “the action of going across,” but apparently i’m wrong. it has to do with an old term for customs levy.
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It also demonstrates the problem with BMI. It’s a calculation involving the square of one’s height. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m three-dimensional.
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You have that exactly right.
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Agreed, And you made a good point in response to my comment earlier as well.
Nevertheless, even if BMI is not a good metric for health, and the cutoffs were randomly changed, it still holds that the average weight is going up
http://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(07)00579-3/journalimage?loc=gr1&src=fig&free=yes&source=imageTab
I seriously doubt the average weight of an Irish woman is 47kg. Australia isn’t exactly a slim nation, but according the Australian Bureau of Statistics the average woman here weighs in at 71.1kg.
Not everybody who is heavy is fat. At my athletic fittest in high school, I weighed about 165 pounds because I had a lot of lean muscle mass from sports and weight training (I was bench pressing about 120 pounds and leg pressing around 500). I would have been too heavy to use this morning after pill even then.
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Does your doctor not prescribe you a dosage?
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I’m talking about over the counter stuff. Presumably there’s a difference in the amount of cold medicine I should take and the amount someone half my size should take.
Actually, you may be right; I’ve discovered that the ‘average’ I was using was an average taking in several different nations: https://www.healthtap.com/topics/average-height-for-a-woman-in-ireland
I’d be a bit astonished at that plump-sounding weight for Australians, though; I’m no sylph and I’m 55kg.
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And when I was slim I was 116kg. Different people are different sizes. If you are not very slim at 55kg then you are also probably not terribly tall.
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