Australia's alleged "fat bomb"



I would rather like the report below to be true. It claims that Australians are extraordinarily fat. Since Australia has one of the world's longest life expectancies, it would help to slay the myth that obesity is unhealthy. Some skepticism about the report has already been expressed, however. The report comes from a nonprofit, not a university, so may simply be a trawl for funds. I have left it for a few days to say much about it as I wished to see details of the research first. The sample would appear to be far from random. I have however not so far been able to find the full report online. It is not linked from their home page and there has been some suggestion that their international comparisons are erroneous. The report is certainly deliberately deceitful in failing to note that it is extremes of weight rather than obesity which is unhealthy. The longest life expectancies are for people of middling weight. Not to put too fine a point on it, the alarmist claims of the report are total junk

AUSTRALIA has become the fattest nation in the world, with more than 9 million adults now rated as obese or overweight, according to an alarming new report. The most definitive picture of the national obesity crisis to date has found that Australians now outweigh Americans and face a future "fat bomb" that could cause 123,000 premature deaths over the next two decades. If the crisis is not averted, obesity experts have warned, health costs could top $6 billion and an extra 700,000 people will be admitted to hospital for heart attacks, strokes and blood clots caused by excess weight.

The latest figures show 4 million Australians - or 26% of the adult population - are now obese compared to an estimated 25% of Americans. A further 5 million Australians are considered overweight. The report, Australia's Future 'Fat Bomb', from Melbourne's Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, will be presented at the Federal Government's inquiry into obesity, which comes to Melbourne today.

A grim picture is painted of expanding waistlines fuelled by a boom in fast food and a decline in physical activity, turning us into a nation of sedentary couch potatoes. Those most at risk of premature death are the middle-aged, with 70% of men and 60% of women aged 45 to 64 now classed as obese.

But some weight specialists have questioned the tool used to measure obesity, saying "entire rugby teams" would be classified as obese if their body mass index (BMI) was calculated. BMI is measured by dividing weight in kilograms by height in metres squared. A BMI of over 25 is considered overweight while more than 30 is obese. But the tool does not distinguish between muscle and fat, prompting calls for the BMI overweight limit to be raised to 28.

However, even leading nutritionist Jenny O'Dea from the University of Sydney - who recently claimed Australia's childhood obesity epidemic had been exaggerated - has backed the new figures, which suggest that the crisis for adults has been drastically underestimated. Professor O'Dea said that while being fat was not necessarily a health risk for everyone, there was no doubt obesity was taking its toll on the nation.

It was previously thought that around 3 million adults were obese. But many past surveys were seen as unreliable as they often required participants to guess their own weight. The latest data was based on more than 14,000 people at 100 rural and metropolitan sites in every Australian state and territory. Each had their BMI recorded by having their weight, height and waist measured as part of a national blood pressure screening day last year.

The report's lead author, Simon Stewart, said that even allowing for the BMI's potential failings, the best case scenario was that 3.6 million adults were battling obesity. "We could fill the MCG 40 times over with the number of obese Australians now, then you can double that if you look at the people who are also overweight - those are amazing figures," Professor Stewart said. "And in terms of a public health crisis, there is nothing to rival this. If we ran a fat Olympics we'd be gold medal winners as the fattest people on earth at the moment," he said. "We've heard of AIDS orphans in Africa, we're looking at this time bomb going off where parents have to think about this carefully," Professor Steward said. "They're having children at an older age, if you're obese and you have a child do you really want to miss out on their wedding? "Do you want to miss out on the key events in their life? Yes you will if you don't do something about your weight now."

The obesity inquiry in Melbourne will be told that a national strategy encouraging overweight Australians to lose five kilograms in five months could reduce heart-related hospital admissions by 27% and cut deaths by 34% over the next 20 years. Among the radical solutions proposed in the report is a plan to make fat towns compete for "healthy" status in national weight loss contests tied to Federal Government funding. Towns that lost the most weight would be given cash to build sports centres and swimming pools. And like the "Tidy Towns" program, communities would have to meet targets to be eligible for a share of the funding pool.

Other suggestions from Professor Stewart's report include subsidised gym memberships, personal training sessions for heavier people and restricting weight loss surgery to those who show they can lose some weight on their own first.

One of Australia's leading obesity experts, Boyd Swinburn, will tell the inquiry in his own submission that a crackdown on junk food marketing to children is paramount in the fight against the epidemic. With the fastest growing rate of childhood obesity in the world, Australia must make radical changes to the way unhealthy food is promoted if the rate is to be reduced, his submission reads. Professor Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University, will argue that better nutritional labelling and more funding for effective treatments such as weight-loss surgery are also necessary. "We've got a huge problem here and we can't bury our head in the sand any more," Professor Swinburn will tell the inquiry. "The previous federal government blamed parents and individuals and told them to pull up their socks . that's not going to achieve anything but make us fatter as a nation. "It's good to see the Rudd Government take obesity seriously with this parliamentary inquiry and the preventative health strategy but that has to be turned into proper policy, regulation and funding."

Ian Caterson, director of the Institute of Obesity, Nutrition and Exercise at the University of Sydney, said innovative government "thinking outside the square" policies were necessary because, "as we get fatter and older as a nation things are just going to get worse."

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Not again! Another government computer system fails

And a dangerous one. My local Yellow cabs and Pizza Hut have great computer systems for managing customers and Bill Gates sells programs that are a thousand times more elaborate. What's wrong with the bureaucratic boneheads? Nobody gives a damn. That's what's wrong. The system was "innovative", of course. Governments should only buy tried and tested systems. They bungle anything else

A $6 MILLION computer system crashed within hours of being turned on last week, leaving Emergency Services staff using pen and paper to dispatch ambulances and fire engines. The Queensland Ambulance Service computer-aided dispatch system, known as VisiCAD, went down for six hours on Wednesday and communications centre staff said patient lives were put at risk across the state.

"Once the crash occurred the computers froze . . . Many other dangerous technical difficulties then occurred," a QAS employee told The Sunday Mail yesterday. The informant said that in the chaos and confusion, two patients with non-life-threatening conditions who had requested ambulances were overlooked. "No one died, but it definitely put lives in danger," the employee said.

He said the Queensland Fire and Rescue ESCAD system crashed for 2® hours at the same time. Queensland's Emergency Services has spent millions of dollars in the past decade trying to find a suitable computer-aided dispatch system. Sources said the new model was rushed in without being properly road-tested.

A QAS spokesman played down the system crash. "The Department of Emergency Services is currently implementing one of the nation's most innovative dispatch systems, called VisiCAD," he said. "The new system will link all QFRS and QAS communications centres with a single state-of-the-art computer-aided system." He said the cause of the "outage" of about 90 minutes late on Wednesday was related to a maintenance issue ["maintenance"? How do you maintain a computer program? Do you oil it?], not the system. "There have been no reports of any significant impact on service delivery." The spokesman said senior management was unaware of any evidence to indicate lives were put at risk.

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Stupid woman revives failed Leftist idea

The heavy diversion of teacher attention to problem students required in "integrated" schools deprives normal students of needed attention

QUEENSLAND Liberal Senator Sue Boyce has called for special schools to be scrapped and disabled children sent into mainstream education. Senator Boyce, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, said it was time someone was "brave" and "crazy" enough to push for total integration of students. "We won't fix education until we abolish special schools," Senator Boyce told a Down Syndrome Association of Queensland fundraiser last week. "If mainstream schools had no option but to accept children with disabilities, they would concentrate on how to make it work, not how to avoid getting involved. "And if all the human and funding resources currently tied up in special schools were handed over to the mainstream system, it would be so much easier to make it work."

Senator Boyce said her 24-year-old daughter had always gone to mainstream schools and is now a bakery assistant. "In the 60s and 70s, no one believed a child with Down syndrome could be educated," she said. "Special anything is a way of excluding them from the community."

She said she had yet to express her opinion to her Liberal Party counterparts because it was her "personal view". But Education Minister Julia Gillard said special schools had an important role in educating many Australian students. "The Rudd Labor Government has promised an education revolution to ensure no Australian kids miss out on a quality education," Ms Gillard said last week. "Unfortunately, it seems the Liberal Party's only plan for education is to shut down schools."

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Jensen defends keepers of the Bible

Note that unlike "modernists" such as Spong, Jensen does not need to wear a pectoral cross etc in order to reinforce his Christian identity



SYDNEY'S Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, has defended a breakaway conference of church leaders in Jerusalem as the true keepers of the authority of the Bible. In an interview with the Herald before the opening yesterday of a conference of 1000 conservative Anglican leaders from 27 countries - including 280 bishops - Dr Jensen described the formal separation of the church into conservative and liberal groupings as a tragedy. The split has emerged since the ordination in the United States five years ago of the openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson.

"We're not dealing with the secular world here. We're dealing with the Christian church, and the Christian church has a constitution which is the Bible," Dr Jensen said. "Now the difficulty here is for a person to claim to belong to the Christian church while at the same time breaching the constitution. It's as if you're a member of a clan and you decide to break the rules of a club. That's understandable to the man on the street, surely."

While he remained committed to the Anglican Church - and refuses to describe the present situation as a split - Dr Jensen said the church would not reunite until the divisions over human sexuality were resolved. "I am passionately committed to being Anglican. I respect very much Christians from other denominations and I don't think being Anglican is the greatest thing in the world, but I believe in it and our intention is not to leave the Anglican Communion," he said. "There is no reason why we should leave the Anglican Church because we have not shifted. It is others who have shifted. We are committed to the Anglican church and want to see it do as well as it possibly can."

Dr Jensen said he would not attend the Lambeth Conference, the gathering of Anglican leaders called by the Archbishop of Canterbury in England next month. "I have decided, as have a number of leading bishops, particularly from Africa, that no, we're going attend this conference alone while this crisis remains unresolved. In the meantime we'll be here and we're working on what the future is going to look like," he said.

Dr Jensen said gay men and women had no reason to feel discriminated against by the stance he had taken on human sexuality. "Furthermore, we strongly abhor any violence or unjust discrimination towards those kinds of people in the community," he said.

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