Monday, March 01, 2004

The obesity league table

A thinly-disguised mish-mash of dodgy science and class predudice was released by Experian, the credit rating agency, under the guise of a league table of obesity. In fact, it is a measure of hospital admissions for type II diabetes which are linked to obesity. Nobody was weighed for this report.

Whether the link between type II diabetes and obesity is strong enough to use as a measure of obesity is not clear. And the 'analysis' seems to be that fat people tend to be uneducated, while thin people live in Surrey. Or something like that.

Britain's fattest towns revealed, BBC News, 1 March 2004