Over time, the body sizes and shapes of Olympians have been moving apart from each other at light-speed, and have become increasingly specialised and differentiated.
School nutrition programmes help reduce the risk of children developing obesity.
Tiger Brands Foundation
A 2011 British survey found 12% of women would give up two to ten years of their lives just to be their ideal weight. So what makes an ideal body, and why do we want one so badly?
We’ve all heard BMI has shortcomings, so what scale should we use to predict our optimum weight?
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Public health authorities are forever telling us how much we should weigh, but there is one essential element missing: shape.
A metrobus driver performs squats at Rio de los Remedios metrobus station in Mexico. To combat growing obesity, lawmakers have introduced a new campaign encouraging physical activity.
Edgard Garrido/Reuters
Weight and girth have become shorthand for health but these are blunt instruments that provide an unreliable and reductive snapshot of its complexities.
The World Health Organisation considers people with a BMI below 18.5 to be underweight and at risk of being malnourished.
Jeanette Goodrich/Flickr
The French government is backing parliamentary plans to ban unhealthily thin models from catwalks, but do the bodies of these models really affect women’s self-image?
People are increasingly reporting their weight as lower than it is, skewing data on obesity rates, according to a new Irish study. The study, published today in PLOS ONE, found the gap in obesity levels…
Obesity’s negative impact on mortality may be outweighed by other factors favourably influencing life expectancy.
Isaac Brown/Stocky Bodies
The rising level of obesity, along with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other related diseases, is predicted to slow down or reverse the decline in mortality seen in most Western countries in recent…
People who eat chocolate on a regular basis tend to be thinner, even when they do not exercise more often, a new study claims. But health experts have warned that the findings of the study, published today…