Who hurts the US Healthcare system worse?

People who weigh a lot and have a big waist are going to tend to have more body fat than people who weigh a lot but have a small waist. The fatter you are, the bigger your waist tends to be.Where you fit within that statistical analysis can give you a notion of how much body fat you have.Nobody thinks its perfect, its just providing a general sense. And of course there's going to be exceptions to the rule.

As peoples' weight goes up, those that have more fat tend to have longer waist lines. You could determine the statistical correlation between weight from fat and waist length and use that to figure out how much length you'd have to remove from the waist to get to the weight of the body without fat. Which is what I presume they did to come up with the equation.

There's lean waists out there to measure. Of course! That's where the fudge factors come in:(body weight x 1.082) - (waist measurement x 4.15) + 98.2 = lean body weight estimate.I'm assuming those numbers came from correlating the equation to actual measurements. If it was terribly inaccurate then nobody would use it. There doesn't have to be.

That could be extrapolated. Yeah, presumably a whole bunch of them, with tweaks to the fudge factors as more data is gathered. Where did you find out about their sample? I doubt its terrible; People are using it.

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(body weight x 1.082) - (waist measurement x 4.15) + 98.2 = lean body weight estimate.

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You should know that all you'd have to do is make the units of that 4.15 conversion factor to be "lbs/inch". You convert your waist size to an amount of weight to be subtracted from your total weight to determine an estimation of how much you would weigh without fat.You then take the difference of that and divide it by your total weight to estimate your percentage of fat.And its just that: an estimation.

The measurements of the lean, leaner, and leanest waists in the data set Not much. Doesn't that make your opposition here a bit pointless? Wouldn't it have to be for the units to make sense? Of course its a statistical inference, that's obvious. But to a lesser extent, apparently. BMI is just height and weight and doesn't distinguish between fat an muscle. A waist measurement makes more sense because you're not going to increase your gut size by building muscle, but you will by gaining fat.And its the same fundamental flaws of any statistical inference. But that doesn't make them all useless. I'm not getting what's so bad about this one.

You subtract your waist size times a conversion factor from your weight times a conversion factor and add a correlation factor to estimate how much you'd weigh without fat. (Its not your weight subtracted from your waist size.)You then take the difference between how much you weigh and the estimate of how much you'd weigh without fat to get an estimate of how much the fat in your body weighs.You then divide the estimate of how much the fat in your body weigh by your total weigh to calculate the percentage of fat in your body.

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(body weight x 1.082) - (waist measurement x 4.15) + 98.2 = lean body weight estimate.

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Step 4
Calculate an estimate of your body fat percentage. Write down your body weight and subtract your lean body weight estimate from it. This number is an estimation of your body fat in pounds.

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Step 5
Divide the estimated body fat in pounds by your total body weight. Multiply this number by 100. This last calculation represents your estimated body fat percentage.

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This isn't that complicated. The sources in the link say that >19% is high and >25% is obese.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

Not that I'm aware of. He said that it was easy to determine if someone was fat. Measuring your waistline. Fatter people tend to have larger waists. How's that work? We haven't gotten that far into the development of the formula yet. That one sounds like you're playing games. The one Oni linked to doesn't. Right, its an estimation. I don't see how the number of pirates could cause the temperature to increase. I can see how adding fat could cause your waistline to increase. I've put on quite a bit of fat in the past 10 years and my waist size has increased significantly. It seems to me that there's a solid causation between "amount of fat" and "waist size".

We haven't established that yet. Let's run some numbers...You mention Shane Carwin earlier:He weighs 254 lbs. What do you think his waist line is? 36 inches?How about Roy Nelson:He also wieghs 254 lbs. What do you think his waist line is? 42 inches?Accoding to the equation:(body weight x 1.082) - (waist measurement x 4.15) + 98.2 = lean body weight estimate.Carwin fat comp. = 12.0%Nelson fat comp. = 21.8%According to the equation, Carwin has an average amount of fat while Nelson has an elevated amount of fat.It seems to work well enough.Obviously pregnant women, or disfigured people, or people who have modified their body are going to be excepted from the trend.Here's a plot of fat content versus waist line for a 254 lb person: The fat content categories are:Average 8-19%
Elevated 20-24%
High health risk* >25%The corresponding wasit lines are:Average 33.5" - 40"
Elevated 41" - 43.5"
High > 44"Those numbers seem fine to me. How much can your waistline be pulled in without decreasing your fat content? How much does that skew the results of the equation? No, the amount of body fat you have causes your waistline to increase. No shit, its an estimate. This is the second time I'm asking you where you found out about thier sample? So some other health issues are coming along for the ride. My cholesterol is a little high and I'm starting to get some acid reflux. My doctor said that if I loose some weigh then those things could go away too.

I guess you don't think the equation is bad anymore... Yes.Being fat is causing the reflux because of the pressure of my belly on my stomach. Its not the having of the fat tissue, by itself, that is causing it though.And the cholesterol is a grey area. Loosing weight by eating healthier foods should lower my cholesterol intake, ad thus lower the number, but my doctor thinks that having less fat in my body will help it lower the cholesterol level as well (IIRC).I understand your position that "having fat in your body" doesn't cause a lot of the health problems, but I think that "being fat" brings along a bunch of health problems with it. And you can improve those problems by loosing the weight.Too, being "obese" as defined by a particular BMI means nothing. But being really fat to the point that your classified as obese does bring along a bunch of health problems with it too, and loosing the weight will help you.

Elderly people can't make themselves younger but fat people are capable of loosing weight. Given the system we have, I think its a good idea to get fat people to loose some weight. It'll help.

But having a lot of fat exacerbates the problem, according to the NIH:

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Type 2 diabetes usually occurs slowly over time. Most people with the disease are overweight when they are diagnosed. Increased fat makes it harder for your body to use insulin the correct way.

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I think associating weight with health is a dumbed-down explanation. If you've got some uneducated fat guy with diabetes, I think a good prognosis is: "you need to loose weight to combat this diabetes". Explaining to him that the simple prevalence of fat is not a root cause to the problem with the way his body uses insulin is just going to go over his head. But apparently the fat content is not incidental. And having a lot of fat will increase your weight. I don't think its a gross error to associate weight with diabetes, especially at a lay-person's level.

No doubt our system sucks.I'm not convined that there are not additional (future) costs to an overly obese population other than that immediate 10% increase. Especially if people continue on getting fatter. Being fat now might cause you problems later that aren't immidiately realized in a direct cost increase today.

Why does that have to be an either/or? Why not both? That don't necessarily make them good doctors.I know my doctor personally, outside of him being my doctor. He's really smart and great at what he does. But he is also in high demand (he' not currently taking new patients). Too, he ain't cheap.But I'm willing to pay more for a great doctor that I know personally. On the one hand, I can afford it. On the other, I don't bother him with every belly-ache I get and reserve his expertise for when its truly needed.

FWIW, I got what you were saying and agree that the problem lies with Theo.But I, too, have had to explain to him what a question mark is/means.