UK: BMI Calculator Caused Excess Consumption

Facts

• The Telegraph reported over the weekend that Britain's National Health Service (NHS) Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator has misled overweight people to eat hundreds of excess calories per day since 2018 — a scale that could have put on roughly 35 pounds (15 kg/2.5 stone) a year on some people.¹
• The BMI is a measure that uses both height and weight to find out if someone's weight is healthy; it divides an adult's weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared. The healthy weight ranges from 18.5 to 24.9.²
• The toll, which was accessed 22M times last year alone but quietly removed from the website this month, reportedly overestimated the calorie-burning impact of very small increases in activity levels.¹
• The Lancet in March found that the BMI calculator offered inaccurate physical activity levels, too, with "moderately active" and "active" deemed to be 30 to 60 minutes and 60 to 150 minutes per week, respectively — despite the official guidelines recommending that adults engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week.³
• The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities reports that about two-thirds of adults in England are above a healthy weight, half of them living with obesity, adding that one-third of children leaving primary school are overweight with a fifth living with obesity.⁴
• Last month, researchers at the European Congress on Obesity presented a study claiming that obese patients cost the NHS twice as much as patients with healthy weight based on health records of 2.4M adults in north-west London.⁵

Sources: ¹The Telegraph, ²NHS.Uk, ³The Lancet, ⁴Fingertips, and ⁵Guardian.

Narratives

• Right narrative, as provided by The Telegraph. This is yet more blatant evidence of public sector incompetence, but the people who keep urging London to expand the nanny state and further meddle in our lives keep pressing on. While obesity is undeniably a problem, Britons should take responsibility for their own actions instead of relying on government bureaucrats.
• Left narrative, as provided by Guardian. Amid fears of facing backlash for interfering in people's diet choices, the UK government over the past decades has failed to tackle the obesity crisis in the country as they favored individual responsibility rather than systemic interventions. Given that this is clearly not working, politicians must be brave and follow the successful actions taken to curb smoking. This is a matter of calibrating the approach.

Predictions