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Comment by sedachv | Hacker News Reader

They also consume a ridiculous amount of bread (+pasta), dairy and sugary beverages. And probably then wonder why they get fat.

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First, they aren't fat.

Second, how can you judge this without knowing how much calories they burn?

Ignore the kids, look at the adults. They're not morbidly obese, but they are carrying excess fat. Without a change in diet, or adopting the training regime of a competitive athlete (do you know how many calories you need to burn every day to stay lean on that kind of diet?), this is likely to trend to obesity as they age.

I am not criticizing their diet. Look at their picture:

http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2007/hungry_planet/1...

These people are NOT obese. They are not super lean either, but for their age this looks like a perfectly healthy weight. In fact they are relatively lean compared to the other families.

Look at photographs of people 60, 80, 100 years ago. The relative perception of obesity in the US is extremely distorted. The average male is 5 feet 9 inches (176cm) and 195 pounds (88 kilograms). That is overweight. The adults in the photo are also overweight.

I'm not from the US, and neither are the people we're talking about. These people look like they weigh less than 88 kilograms, which I agree would be obese for 176cm.

Are you obese (by your own standards)?

Can you at least bother to look up the definition of the key words before arguing?

Obese: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity

Overweight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overweight

Oh I wasn't aware that there were testable definitions. Then I consider it unlikely that the adults in the German family are either obese or overweight. On what are you basing your claim that their BMI is greater than 25 kgm^-2?

Also BMI is getting phased out in favour of ratio between circumferences of hips and belly. It has much better correlation with lots of diseases than BMI.

They don't look that fat :)

the American, Italian and Mexican families appear to consume equal or greater amounts.

Which is why it's no surprise that the Mexican family is also overweight.

But actually look at the photos of the American and Italian families. The Italians have almost half the food the Germans have, a small fraction of sugar drinks, and very little dairy. They also have one more child in the family. Which is why they look fit.

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