Is Ireland generally a fat country, on average?

bbam wrote: »

You'll find them plodding round shopping centres as their pass time. That way they never have to walk up a hill and are never too far from a pizza or snack box.
obesity is definitely a problem and it's on the rise, and seriously on the rise in children.

Czarcasm wrote: »

Won't somebody please think of the... Ahh fcuk it, I can't be àrsed, suffice to say that such silly generalisations and scaremongering just get on my tits. Nothing personal bbam as I guess when one hears it often enough in the media they start to believe it, but it's a misguided perception.

Obesity or anything even approaching it isn't on the rise in children. Their preoccupation with their body image IS on the rise though given that they are constantly bombarded with, and subjected to, all this nonsense.

They shouldn't be, and they should be allowed to be children, and develop naturally and normally, but with knee-jerk reactive parents feeding nothing but their insecurities, children's preoccupation with their weight is one metric that's unlikely to decrease in the future. If anything it's only likely to get worse.

Well actually this isn't media perception..
My OH is a healthcare professional who deals with these kids on a daily basis.. If you think this is all media hype then you have your head in the sand.. its well documented that the irish population is getting heavier and heavier and there is an alarming increase in childhood obesity..
Clinics for overweight and obese children are becoming the norm..

http://www.irishheart.ie/media/pub/factsheets/obesity.pdf

38% of irish adults are overweight, with 23% being obese.
22% of Irish 5-12 year olds are overweight or obese

I suppose the Irish Heart Foundation are in on the hype too.. :rolleyes:

Given these numbers its expected that in years to come illness and disease related to obesity and overweight will cripple the healthcare system in Ireland.

Your numbers

National Below average
You have a lower BMI than 87% of females aged 15-29 in your country

Global Below average
You have a lower BMI than 74% of females aged 15-29 in the world


You're most like someone from Vietnam*

* Compared with other females aged 15-29 in Vietnam

I just did the survey again in the OP there (I was on mobile yesterday so the link didn't work properly, BMI isn't recommended as a metric for an individual weight anyway but that aside...)


Your numbers

National: Above Average
You have a higher BMI than 71% of males aged 30-44 in your country

Global: Above Average
You have a higher BMI than 82% of males aged 30-44 in the world


You're most like someone from Qatar*

* Compared with other males aged 30-44 in Qatar


And it seems the country closest to the "magic figure", a BMI of 25, with a national BMI of 24.99, is Uzbekistan.


Well, as Borat would say-

I have Bangladeshi BMI. What a pleasing piece of alliteration.

Czarcasm wrote: »

(OT: I swear, I'll rip out that backspace button one of these days! Had my post almost written out and went to close a quote with "]"... hit the frickin' backspace button instead! :mad:)

Anyway, here goes, again:



And you don't think this might color your perception somewhat? The fact that your OH deals with it on a daily basis just means that they would see this issue more often than say the average joe who wouldn't be as tuned into the issue as your OH and clearly yourself are.

I on the other hand, have spent years researching, studying and analysing not just obesity, but the whole spectrum of eating disorders and body dysmorphia.




With all due respect bbam, I beg to differ, far from it being me with my head in the sand, I think it's yourself is suffering from blinkered vision, and I'll demonstrate why in a minute.




OK, well given these figures then, and given that the latest data from the PDF you linked to is five years out of date - here we are five years later (or, the years have come, if you prefer?), so lets look at how things stack up -

From the PDF:

"Obesity is the most common nutritional disorder in the world"

Source: World Health Organisation, 2003 (Ten years out of date)

Fast forward ten years-



Source: http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/ida/en/

Same source, just ten years later.

Now, here are some more "facts" and statistics from around the same time period as the sources in your PDF (1992 - 2009, I'm afraid I haven't time right now to drill down into where your sources are pulling their data from and correlate the figures and years):

http://www.bodywhys.ie/media/stats-facts/#_edn14

But as you can see, this is the reason why I personally anyway, hate applying statistics to human beings. Bodywhys.ie puts it better -





Source: http://www.bodywhys.ie/media/stats-facts/#_edn14

But the children assessed in the report weren't patients nor accessing care when they were surveyed..
They were regular school going kids and their school was chosen for the study.. Children from 28 schools from all over the country were selected.
From these ordinary kids in regular schools 22% were found to be obese or overweight.

More adults and children in Ireland are now overweight or obese, this is not a good thing for them nor the country as a whole.

Aparrently many organisations disagree with you on overweight/Obesity being on the increasae or being a problem.
http://corknutrition.ie/childhood-obesity-the-silent-epidemic/

http://www.cuh.ie/index.php?id=129&items=68

http://www.growingup.ie/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/Second_Child_Cohort_Reports/Growing_Up_in_Ireland_-_Overweight_and_Obesity_Among_9-Year-Olds_Executive_Summary.pdf

http://www.irishhealth.com/clin/ffl/obesity.html

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0620/325806-pre-school-children-overweight-report/

I've no doubt that all the media talk about obesity is risky or anyone borderline tendencies towards eating disorders.

However this isn't a good enough reason to avoid talking about obesity or it's problems.
Also it's a bit disingenuous to imply that so many reputable organisations are manipulating or misrepresenting the figures to somehow overstate the state of the nations overweight/obesity. It's been well documented both in Ireland and across Europe.

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

You've said this before and it's not true this time either.
Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean everyone else is also at the same level of ignorance

Wow! Ironic AND insulting. Somebody's on a roll! :pac:

I won't turn the thread into a pìssing contest, but suffice to say you couldn't be more ill informed about me personally Kaiser tbh. However seeing as we're barrelling toward a brick wall yet again on this occasion, I'll let you think your opinion is correct.

I do not happen to share the same compulsion to win an argument on the internet.

Look, statistics CAN be used in a manipulative way. I'm going to use purely made up numbers to demonstrate. Let's say a survey of 100 primary schools is done and they schools are sampled to be representative of city/suburban/rural and socioeconomic factors. In each school they measure and weigh 25 children from infants, 25 in 1st/2nd, 25 in 3rd/4th and 25 in 5th/6th class. Approximately half are boys, half are girls. They have a fully representative sample and find that 20% of children are overweight/obese. They find that of children in schools considered to be in areas of low socioeconomic status 40% are overweight or obese. Then they look at the gender of these overweight kids and they find that girls tend to be overweight three times more frequently than boys - 30% of girls and 10% of boys are overweight/obese. Then they look at the age profile and find that the kids in 5th/6th class are the most overweight - let's, for arguments sake, say 60% are overweight and the gender ratios remain the same, so now 45% of girls and 15% of boys are overweight/obese.

So this is where the statistics can "lie". If they take the results of girls aged 11-13 in a school in a disadvantaged area and state "45% of children in the sample are overweight or obese", they aren't lying. They're just selecting the sample to prove their point - it's 8 out of 10 cats. Without an agenda they'd say "20% of children in Ireland are overweight or obese".

Which is why people say lies, lies and damned statistics. But it's not the statistics themselves that lie - it's the qualifiers (or lack of) that are given and whether any bias in sampling existed and is reported or not that matters.

So you have to look at the statistics in the context of who is producing them. If the Irish Heart Foundation is saying that 22% of Irish children between 5 and 12 years of age are overweight or obese, can we trust that statistic? Probably. There might be some bias in that they want to encourage exercise and all that, but they've no incentive to exaggerate the statistics. But we can go to the report to see if it's balanced. If they were promoting an agenda of weight loss and health improvement, then there'd be an incentive to sample to get high obesity numbers to get high funding and awareness, right? But instead they say,

Long-term weight loss is extremely difficult to achieve. Adults who remain in
conventional weight loss programmes can realistically expect a maximum weight loss
of only 10%

They also quote where their statistics come from - Irish Universities Nutrition Alliance. Who are they?

IUNA is made up of four academic nutrition units from University College Cork, University of Ulster, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin. By bringing together the specific expertise from these four nutrition units, IUNA has been able to involve itself in a broad area of nutrition and food research.

No cause for any bias there, that I can see. They're just researchers! They aren't promoting a product or agenda.

Then if we look at the study quoted by the IHF,

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.iuna.net/docs/chapter2tables2_1to10.pdf

they've done their utmost to get a representative sample. Maybe farming backgrounds are undersampled. They've even gone so far as to compare with what the census found (Table 2.8) and it broadly agrees. The education level of the respondants is higher than the national average, so I guess that has to be taken into account a little. Are the children of those who did degrees more or less likely to be overewight than the children of those who left school after primary school? If they're more likely than the obesity numbers found are likely to be a bit high. If they're less likely than there's probably a higher %age of kids overweight/obese than will be reported. If there's no difference then the number should still be representative.

So I think it's safe to say that about 22% of irish kids are overweight/obese and whatever %ages reported for teenagers and adults are probably in the right ballpark as well.

What you do with those is up to you but
* We know that excess weight causes health problems
* Increased health problems cost money

Drawing some conclusions along the lines of "Ireland has a problem with excess weight" seems to be perfectly reasonable, given the available data.