Happy New Year

Have you put on a few extra pounds over the festivities? So have I, but it's ok; following this good news, we now learn that the danger of stuffing our faces with turkey and mince pies isn't as bad as we were led to believe. From the Scotsman:

"GLUTTONS who have eaten too much during the festive period can relax - they may not be as overweight as they think.

Researchers in the United States believe the international measure of obesity - the Body Mass Index (BMI) - is too strict, and labels people as overweight even though they will go on to live as long a life as those considered to be perfectly healthy.

Obesity experts said the latest work reinforced their previous calls for waist size to be used in conjunction with BMI calculations to determine health risks.

According to the unpublished research by Dr Jerome Gronniger, of the US Congressional Budget Office, data from more than 33,000 US adults showed the highest life expectancy was among people with higher scores than their optimum BMI."

I've always instinctively been sceptical of this BMI. I've been more or less (until the last couple of months) been at my supposed optimum weight and all I get is people, actually only ever women, asking if I'm ok, saying I look like I've lost a lot of weight, looking awfully thin etc. And it's the BMI measure that leads to the statistic that some 20% of Scottish schoolchildren are obese. This would mean you'd expect an average of 6 kids in any class to be officially obese. Don't believe it - I don't think I've seen any class with 6 kids who could reasonably be classed as obese.

We can eat and drink and be merry. If we worried about all the stuff we could worry about - that will surely kill us? Wishing y'all the best for 2006.