Is size 16 'normal' - or a serious danger?

[sandybrown]

Please take a look at The Mail on Sunday, health section, very interesting!

Female at 36, total cholesterol =4,BMI=25.2

Female at 44, total cholesterol =6.3,BMI=32

Female at 52 total cholesterol =5.6, BMI=32.3

Female at 62, total cholesterol =7.6

There experts gave their views, statin is only mentioned for female aged 62 (BMI=24.7)!!.

Each woman was given an intensive BUPA Essential Health Assessment, which measured blood pressure, pulse, heart rate, lung function, blood glucose, diabetes risk and heart-disease risk. Blood tests checked for cholesterol and liver and kidney problems (such as gout).

[Aliwally]

dailymail.co.uk/health/arti...

This should be the article.

[Penel]

Nothing to do with their size! Everything to do with eating sugar and drinking too much.

[sandybrown]

Hi,

Two findings from the report.

1. Cholesterol is increasing with age.

2. Low BMI, high cholesterol? Experts have not offered station for cholesterol level 6.3 and 5.6.

It would be interesting to find out from the BUPA experts their view of cholesterol numbers.

My experience with GP, high BMI therefore you have high cholesterol and high blood sugar level. All my life I have been wide and heavy, this is due to weight training in my younger days.

Life style change has helped me to reduce HbA1C level but not cholesterol at the age of 67.

NHS food plan has not helped me either, now I am on my own plan for food. Only time will tell.

[MikePollard]

Look around!

Have you ever seen an obese wild animal, bird, fish? We are the only specie on the planet who diet (and need to) and who are so far off what nature would have us eat to nourish our bodies it's a joke.

On the aesthetic side.

No woman comparing their body shape to that of the oft exampled Kelly Brook would swap her shape for the 'curvy' examples above.

However, there is a normalisation of the size 16, glaring examples evidenced by daytime bingo ads.

The same philosophy applies to men. What man want's to look like the 'normalised' dads seen on TV who are nearly always two or more stone overweight?

[patch14]

If you are 5 foot and a size 16 you are overweight. If you are 5ft 10in and a size 16 you are OK! It is all to do with the 21st Century attitude to beauty. You only have to go to an art gallery to see the paintings of the 18th Century and you realise that overweight men and women were revered! Portliness was seen as a sign of wealth and status. After all the poor were skin and bone!

MikePollard is right. We are what we eat! We have come a long way from the cave man ancestor and in some cases thank goodness. We live longer and can cure many diseases but the one disease we cannot cure is the modern way of life. We have done this to ourselves and it is up to us, not the NHS or our local GP to sort it out. We all know what we have to do to improve things - diet, exercise, natural foods and not keep relying on the medical profession to keep us going with pills and potions because we still want to smoke, drink to excess and drive door to door instead of walking there!

We have girls, and boys, driven to anorexia; we have companies making millions out of "diet" foods but only 1000 miles away people are starving. We are living in a topsy turvy world. Let's try to get it back on a even keel and start to live a healthier life. A life that for each of us, and we are all different so lifestyles will differ, is a happy one.