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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

The CDC graph really confuses me. 40% of US men are overweight, 35% are obese, 5% are extremely obese. If I add that up, 80% of American men are overweight. Maybe it is because I live in Los Angeles, and it is really hard to believe that 80% of American men are overweight.

Really, 4 out of 5? I get that other parts of the country are different, but I also think BMI is a really crude tool that paints some healthy people as weighing more than they should for their height. But it can be muscle, it can be body type, etc.

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Yep, I'm technically overweight even when I have a 6pack. 185 lbs at 6ft.

Ive been lifting for 6 years, and my lowest weight I get is 183lbs, after this I begin to starve and overeat due to how skinny I am.

I dont know the solution, but my doctor looked at me and knew I was healthy even though I was technically overweight.

That sounds like a problem with the definition of overweight, which probably uses BMI. BMI doesn't seem to scale well to athletic builds.

But that is my point: that is how people get to statistics like 80% of American men are overweight. Like the poster above, I am 6'. So I am kind of tall and broad shouldered, due to genetics. If I weigh 185 I am overweight, although I think at that weight I look reasonably trim. Working out eventually makes me weigh more, because muscle weighs more. I have seen papers where people say 'Overweight' people (as defined by BMI) actually have longer life spans than normal BMI people. Keep in mind, some people get to normal BMI via chemotherapy. It is only at Obese and very Obeses that you see negative effects.

For the biggest group of American men, this article is implying that they are unhealthy, when the facts are that they are actually healthy.

I'm not saying this isn't among the most important health issues in the US. I just think you need a more reasonable standard or a lot of people will just throw up their hands.

I know that BMI is imperfect, but it seems like a reasonable enough proxy measure when you're looking at whole-population trends for the USA. I don't think a more reasonable measure is really needed for this purpose.

The BMI of athletes, or the limited options of people who live in food deserts, really seem like missing-the-forest-for-the-trees tangents in these sorts of discussions. According to the "rise of obesity in America" chart in the article, overweight-or-more among American women went from about 40% in 1960 to about 80% in 2014, with the highest percentage increase in the "extremely obese" subgroup. It's interesting to speculate about what drives it. But I don't think we can explain the trend with "they got shredded" or "they moved to food deserts" when we're talking about 40% of all American women.

Maybe my intuition is wrong -- maybe there are enough people with high muscle mass that it's skewing entire charts like the Vox article shows. If you have citations to that effect, I'll read them with gratitude.

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