British women receive prestigious European award (32)

So here are the figures for the UK and Italy across the age ranges. They are % of the population in the age range who are considered 'obese' where 'obese' has been determined by a Body Mass Index greater than 30 (weight in kilos divided by square of height-in-meters).

One thing that stands out is that both men and women do rather let themselves go in middle-age. The galling thing is that the number of lardy 40-something Italians is still less than the number of chubby 20-somethings we produced in the UK.

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Really? Apparently it's now considered healthy.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2009/06/...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmou...

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/lard-the-new...

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Thanks for that, very interesting stats because they're so detailed. Where did you get them?

There's clearly a big problem with obesity in the UK, much worse than in many other countries. See CIA World Fact Book which gives overall obesity figure for every country, though not in such detail as Top_Class has quoted.

Not racist, just very innaccurate.

1)Many people who live in big cities hugely overestimate the proportion of ethnic minority people in the country as a whole. Even if most ethnic people were fat, there's too few of them to seriously distort the statistics for the whole country.

2)No one's suggesting the "majority" of white women are fat, let alone "the majority of women you know". It's not a majority yet but it is still a worrying large number. Take a walk round any city centre and you'll see for yourself. and take a walk round any hospital out-patients clinic and you'll see the results.

3) The supposed preference for fat women among other races is greatly exaggerated. Check out any Bollywood movie, especially those with lots of dancing girls. Admittedly the average Asian or African bloke probably wouldn't fancy Ally McBeal or Julia Roberts. But then, nor would I.

4) The biggest immigrant group in recent years has been the East Europeans, and they are much less obese than English women, based on my own observations (conducted for purely scientific reasons of course).

1).Correct. 2). Correct. 3)Well that is debatable since they say "beauly is in the eye of the beholder".4). Correct. But the real problem is this. Walk about any city and you will see at least a number of cheap takeaway food joints,even corners and cheap food shops. The fact is its easy to obtain cheap but over caloried food and hard to find food which is healthy due to A).The removal of domestic science in state schools and B).The lack of education by mothers of daughters in the art of shopping for right foods.

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Edited 29 Nov 11, 6:02 PM by Empress_Martine

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