Thursday 15 February 2018

Childhood obesity figures are worthless

No news story about obesity in Britain is complete without the factoid about one in three children being overweight or obese. This statistic can easily be found on the Office for National Statistics website, but understanding the methodology behind it requires a little more digging.

I have hesitated to write about this for some time because I thought I must be missing something. I couldn't believe that such important statistics could be estimated in such a ridiculous way.

But they are, and the scale of child obesity in this country has been grossly inflated as a result. Read my article at Spectator Health and all will be explained.

There's more to say about this so I'll probably write a follow up piece. If you have questions or comments, leave them under the Spectator article and I'll try to respond.





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