This post on Marx’s class structure (which is not the same as wealth or social class) provides some illumination on the mindsets of employers and employees. It also points out that the US move to individual investing for retirement, like 401(k) plans and IRAs, is muddying the waters a bit. As someone who’s retired, I’m no longer a worker. My income is based on occasional sales of mutual funds. As an owner of those funds, I own (very) partial shares of some companies – but I’m not making decisions on how to hire or how to treat employees, so I’m not an employer.
The American Medical Association has once again felt the need to point out that using the body mass index (BMI) is flawed – and not just because it’s a simple height-weight ratio that determined “normal” based on a Belgian mathematician’s quest for the “average man”, by measuring a group of handy European men’s heights and weights. It was adapted for medical use in the 19702 when American physiologist and dietician Ancel Keys used a group of 7,426 men from “healthy” sample groups from the US, Italy, Japan, Finland, and South Africa. But, as always, a height-weight ratio doesn’t tell you anything about how much muscle people have, which affects overall health. And the BMI targets didn’t consider common variations between men and women, or between people of different ethnicities. Finally, while fatness often correlates with things like high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart issues, there’s a significant number of people whom BMI considers not “normal weight”/”fat” who are healthy by metabolic and other tests.
So, is the AMA recommending checking blood pressure, blood sugar, or other metabolic markers? Of course not! They recommend checking waist circumference to identify the dreaded “fat” people, possibly with the addition of checking “fat ratio” via bioelectrical impedance analysis or other scans.
Or you can consider the advice offered by dietician Tim Crowe:
A better focus is to be as healthy as you can be at whatever weight you are,” Dr Crowe says.
“If you smoke, give up smoking, if you’re inactive, be more active, eating better — all of those, if you do them they may not change your weight but they will certainly improve your health.”
Considering that no one has a way for most fat people to permanently become thin, I’d say that sounds good.
Living ~400lbs 