Now why would you present the statistics in that way, making the differences seem smaller.
I'm not sure what you mean. I simply stated how many outliers there are, and that it's not "rare." But rather quite common. Approximately 75 million people in the US.
Children aren't (or shouldn't be) put in diet classes due to one measurement. The aim with children is not to make them lose weight but to keep their weight stable while they grow, by increasing exercise and cutting out junk food/inserting healthier food into their diet. Following a nutritious diet is not the same as 'dieting'.
I agree, which is why I think the first step when you get a letter home should be to take your child to a GP who can assess their health properly. Going to things like MoreLife, or suddenly focusing too much on their diets can lead to life long eating disorders and self esteem issues.
Obesity is rising, but so are eating disorders among young children. And I think weighing children at school is a big reason for that. BMI is faulty, the only reason it's used is because it's easy, not because it's accurate. Accurate health assessments are far more costly and require more attention. Much easier to divided height by weight and tell someone they are unhealthy. There should be more of a focus on healthy lifestyles, and less of a focus on a person's actual weight. Especially children's.
And that argument would be fine if we were all healthier. Except we're not.
Again, that depends how you look at it. In the past our life spans were shorter and the major diseases were caused by poor sanitation and malnutrition. Now, we've traded in diseases caused by lack of nutrition for diseases caused by "too much" nutrition. However, we also have the medical abilities to treat these diseases, which weren't available in the past.
In most terms, we are living longer, better quality lives than our ancestors.
We've gone from one extreme to another, and finding that balance will be hard, but overt focus on weight isn't the answer, especially as yo-yo dieting and stress is just as linked to ill health as being obese in the first place.
If you look at a skeleton of a fat person, and the skeleton of a slim person,there is very little variation, other than in height.
So Michael Phelps shoulder width is the same as your average joe on the street? No. His "wingspan" is actually longer than his height, which is unusual. If you read up on forensics you'll see that human skeletons are actually very different. Broader shoulders, higher foreheads, longer leg bones and arm bones, larger or smaller hand structure, etc etc etc. People aren't just up and down, they are also wide. So you do get different frame sizes. If all human skeletons were the same what would be the point in reconstructing them to help find out the identities of murder victims, we'd all look the same right?
Outliers when using the children's ranges are very rare, because they allow for exactly the sort of variations you describe.
No. It's just as faulty as the adult ones. It does make some allowance for growth, but generally it underestimates the amount of unhealthy fat carried by "healthy weight" children and overestimates the amount of fat carried by "overweight" children. Ideally all children should be getting regular health assessments and have access to healthy foods and lots of exercise. But, again, much easier to place kids on a graph and tell them their unhealthy or healthy without further assessment.
Generally healthy eating habits and exercise need to be promoted to EVERY child. Not just the ones with "unhealthy" BMI's. And BMI needs to be tossed out the window in favor of more accurate measurements, like waist to hip and waist to height measures.