BAD news piled up for the US this week. Not only could the number of obese American have been underestimated by as much as 50 per cent over the last 15 years, but Americans are not as healthy as their British counterparts.
Majid Ezzati and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health found that men and women unintentionally give false information during nationwide health surveys. Women often underestimate their weight, while men overestimate height, both of which mess up the body-mass-index calculations used to work out whether someone is overweight.
Ezzati estimates that during 2002, for example, around 29 per cent of men were actually obese compared with the US Centers for Disease Control figure of 22 per cent. Likewise, 35 per cent of women were obese compared with the official estimate of 20 per cent (The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol 99, p 250).
Advertisement
Meanwhile, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (vol 295, p 2037) compared rates of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke and cancer in groups of similarly aged Americans and Britons. It found the Britons were much healthier, despite greater expenditure on healthcare in the US.
