The BMI and the SMI

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

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Not much invites the ire of many people more than the mention of their body mass index. Obviously not satisfied with having only individuals frustrated with that measurement, a recent publication in the online issue of BMC Public Health sought to unify those against their BMIs into a mob!

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) are suggesting that confronting total population weight is crucial for our species’ food security and ecological sustainability because the energy demands of a species depends not only on its numbers but also on its total mass.

Ian Roberts, a professor of epidemiology and public heath at LSHTM, who chaired the study, coalesced the heretofore-fragmented BMI resistance with his simple yet encompassing statement: “Everyone accepts that population growth threatens global environmental sustainability — our study shows that population fatness is also a major threat. Unless we tackle both population and fatness, our chances are slim.”

Population fatness creates just as great a stress on world resources as population numbers, according to Dr. Roberts and the other scientists. In their opinion, the total global effect of overweight and obese people is the same as adding a half a billion people to the 7 billion that already weigh down our planet.

And thus was born what I term the SMI or our societal mass index.

You see, around half the food energy a human being eats is used up by his or her physical activity. The more mass a person has, the more energy he or she needs for the same amount of physical activity because it takes more energy to move a heavier body. Even when not moving, a heavier body burns more energy. This does not even consider the vast resources that have to be used for the increased size of all the products we use, and the increased energy usage of moving all those heavier humans and products around. Our environmental problem involves both increasing food usage and increasing energy usage.

Using data from the United Nations and the World Health Organization, the study estimated that the weight of all the adult humans on the planet adds up to 287 million tons, and that 15 million of this is due to the overweight and 3.5 million to the obese.

From this the researchers concluded the following: “Increasing population fatness could have the same implications for world food energy demands as adding an extra half a billion people living on the earth.”

The real figure is likely even higher because the researchers used figures from the 2005 WHO report, which had the world’s population at approximately 6.4 billion, and the United Nations predicts there could be 8.9 billion humans by 2050.

Unlike my prior column, where there was one correct reason where people felt that their BMI category was incorrect, the SMI is never incorrect. Regardless of what makes up the excess bulk, whether fat or muscle, it is adding just as much of a burden to the SMI — and muscle probably more, as it burns more calories than fat by weight.

Unlike the BMI, the SMI has only two divisions:

1. Global environmental sustainability
2. We don’t want to go there

Just as every grain of sand makes its contribution to the whole of a sustainable beach, ever individual with a high BMI is part of the increasingly unsustainable SMI of our earth. Perhaps it is time we think about lowering our contribution to that!

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The BMI and the SMI is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/07/02/the-bmi-and-the-smi/

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