A victory for women’s health

A fashion show in Rome has carried out it’s early threats, and banned 15 models for being too skinny . When one looks at these models, the following quote is hardly surprising: "One girl fainted during the trials," he said, adding, "I had to give her a ham sandwich.” The only question is whether even the Roman standards are enough- there is every reason to believe that even the “healthy” weights are too skinny:
1. I used to sell life insurance, and was surprised to learn that the insurance industry has it’s own “ideal weight” charts- and they average 20% heavier than the doctor’s charts! The instructor in the licensing class said, “I’m not permitted to say that people are healthier at these weights- I’m not licensed to practice medicine. But we do know that they live longer; we know, we write the checks.”
2. Following a tip from my wife, I did a little research of the medical industry’s numbers. They may have changed them in the last couple years since I did the research, but at the time I found this: if you take an average woman at the “ideal” weight, and use their formulae for the daily calorie count needed for maintenance, and spend those calories according to their food pyramid, it’s impossible for that woman to get the minimum RDA of several vitamins and minerals without taking supplements!
I can only hope the Roman example becomes an industry trend.

Thoughts on food

A private response to my post on Swedish Christmas customs inspired some thoughts on food. I was told that another Yule time legacy from Sweden’s Viking past is a test of courage and stamina called “eating lutefisk”. I looked it up- this involves soaking herring in toxic, caustic lye before cooking it. But that’s not the weird part- the weird part is that we do something similar right here in America! It seems that someone- probably from Minnesota- decided that corn, too, should be soaked in caustic lye before eating; thus was born hominy. This got me to thinking- how on Earth did we think of some of the things we do to food?

Some recipes, even fairly complex ones, aren’t hard to guess how they came about. Cake, for example- I’m picturing a hung over bachelor stumbling into the pantry one morning, and finding what is in every bachelor’s pantry: two cups of dry cereal, an egg, and a half cup of milk left over from making cappuccino the night before. He shrugs, mixes it all together, throws it into the oven and goes to the bathroom for Visine and a long shower. When he returns to the kitchen he finds that he has invented cake.

Other foods are much harder to figure out. Coffee, for example- who invented that? “Hey, Bill, I got this great idea! You know those hard, red berries on the coffee bush?” “Yeah, once I made my little brother eat a handful- he barfed, then started twitching. It was hilarious!” “OK, we take some of those, roast them ‘til they’re brown and sticky, then throw them in boiling water to leach out all the poisons...” “And...?” “Then we drink it!” “Righhhhhht....”

Or take sausage. Pan sausage is easy enough to figure out; once the principle of grinding meat was established, spicing it was obvious. But link sausage? Do you KNOW what sausage skins are? How on Earth did it ever occur to someone to stuff their spiced hamburger into THOSE?

Or yogurt- who had the guts to be the first to try that? Again, I’m thinking bachelors. “Hey, guess what I found in the back of the fridge? It’s that bottle of milk we bought last year! Wanna try it?” “Dude, it’s quivering!” “C’mon, I dare ya!”

At least with the evolution of life forms we can see the intermediate steps, see the progression from one form to another; but with food, it’s often a mystery. How did we go from cucumber sandwiches to pickles? Was there ever a dish of fresh cucumbers, vinegar, and garlic that was just allowed to sit too long? The same question goes for sauerkraut. Or haggis- was it a common thing to serve your oatmeal in a sheep’s stomach before it occurred to someone to add lungs and other organ meats to it?

What foods can you not figure out?

Update to BMI

Speaking about the BMI calculator to my wife and another female friend, I was given another tidbit about the government's reccomendations: an adult female, in the "normal" BMI range, consuming the number of calories reccomended to maintain that weight, and allocating those calories in the manner prescribed in the food pyramid, will not receive the full RDA of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. Interesting.

BMI

If I have any readers (perhaps I should end the sentence right there) with medical training, perhaps they could explain something about the Body Mass Index to me.

My first love was engineering, before I betrayed the true faith and went into sales. As an engineering student, I was taught that because there are three dimensions, mass is a cubic function, written as (weight / length^3) = k. If you increase or reduce the size of an object while maintaining the same proportions, just blowing up the blueprint, its weight varies as the cube of the change- for example, if you double the length of an object, you also double its height and depth, so its weight is (2^3), or eight times as much. This applies to everything, even complicated devices, because each part follows the same law. It even applies to animals- the way scientists can estimate the weight of a dinosaur is to have a veterinarian examine the bones and tell a sculptor the kind of musculature it must have had, and between them they make a model of the dinosaur… knowing that flesh has about the density of water, they then dunk the model in a tank to get its water weight, and use the formula above to size it up correctly.

Now we come to the Body Mass Index. The formula for that, gotten off the CDC website, is (weight / height^2)(703) = BMI. Notice that this is a squared function, not a cubic! This formula would have the weight of two near-twins, identical in every possible way except height, vary by the square of their height, rather than the cube, as all other masses in the universe do. I can’t figure out what there is about the human body that would have it obey separate physical laws. I even tried charting the weights and BMI of famous people to try and understand.

Knowing that whichever function was correct, the cube or the square, inherent in the math is the fact that they will be closest to true in the smaller numbers, so I started charting at only five feet tall. Using the BMI formula, “normal” for 60” tall is from 94 ¾ lbs to 127 ½- that seemed reasonable to me, so I used that as the set point for the cubic formula as well. I then ran both formulae to 72” tall. The BMI formula gives the low end of normal for six feet tall as 136 ½ lbs… that’s what the late Don Knotts weighed at 5’6”- would Barney Fife have looked normal stretched out to six foot tall?? The "cube of the difference" formula makes the lighter side of normal at six foot tall to be 163 ¾ instead. I started looking for even taller famous people. Two-time MVP of the NFL, Indianapolis’ own Peyton Manning, at 6’5” and 230 lbs, has a BMI of 27.27- well into the “fat” category! But if you use the “cube of the difference” formula, “normal” for that height would be from 200 to 269 lbs. Shaquille O’Neal, at 7’2” and 325 lbs. has a BMI of 30.89- morbidly obese! But the cubic formula would have him right in the center of the normal range of 278 – 375 lbs… which is where most of the 7-footers in the NBA fall.

My conclusion: both theory and observed anecdotal evidence tell me that the BMI formula is fatally flawed, and that the taller you are above five foot, the greater the error will be. If there is a doctor reading this, would you please explain where the flaw in my thinking is?