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Don’t worry Australia, you’re not fatter than America

A new report says nine million Australian adults are overweight.

The Australian press has been quick to declare their country “world’s fattest nation”. The Age, for example, says, “The latest figures show 4 million Australians — or 26% of the adult population — are now obese compared to an estimated 25% of Americans.”

“Overweight and obese people now make up the vast majority of us and these are the drastic measures now needed to bring these numbers down,” says report author Simon Stewart, head of preventative cardiology at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute (press release 1).

Just one problem – it doesn’t seem to be true that Australia is fatter than the US…


The Australia’s Future Fat Bomb report details height and weight checks carried out on 14,000 adults in 2005. It found almost 4 million adult Australians are currently obese, in a country with a population of 20 million (report pdf).

The report also says (pdf page 9):

In summary, 26% of adult men aged 18 years and older were overweight whilst 41% were classified as obese (Figure 3a). In comparison, whilst 20% of women were overweight, 54% were obese (Figure 3b).

So someone needs to have a word with the proof readers, more obese people than overweight people? Reading the numbers off the graph seems to show these should be the other way round.

Strangely, despite the claims of the press, these numbers wouldn’t mean Australia was the world’s fattest country. According to the US government NHANES data obesity among Americans runs at over 30%, and according to this JAMA article it’s 32.2%.

Where has this confusion come from? Well Stewart does say in the press release, “As we send our athletes off to the Olympics let’s reflect on the fact that we would win the gold medal problem now in the world fat Olympics if there was such a thing. “We used to be down mid-table, but I’m picking that we’re now the gold medal favourites.”

It seems someone just picked that up and ran with it.

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    Sergio Stagnaro MD said:

    Overweight and obese people are notoriously at real risk of metabolic disorders, like dyslipidamias and type 2 diabetes. In spite of indicating the failure of preventive medicine, such as percentage of overweighted individuals are not all at risk of diseases, at all. In fact, diabetes, hypertension, CAD, a.s.o. may involve exclusively sujects with Biophysical-semeiotic constitution-dependent, related Inherited Real Risk, as I demonstreted earlier (www.semeioticabiofisica.it, Bibliography and Practical Applications). In conclusion, there is a lot of way to go along, before an efficacious Primaery Prevention of most common and severe disorders can be realized.

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