“Standards of Identity” are not in and of themselves a bad thing. If a product comes to market claiming to be one thing but it is not, it may damage the market for all other products. Imagine a tv manufacturer claiming to sell a HD tv that is not HD, for example.
In this case, the pasta industry did not want their product confused with the new noodles coming from Nissin; this was back in the days when many Americans may not have readily known the difference between pasta noodles and ramen noodles, and wondered why they were paying more for pasta than they could for ramen.
Now those rules might be perverted to suit protectionist goals, but that’s the whole art of effective hopefully minimalist regulation: it’s very hard to do.
Alternatively, it might be the fact that the pasta company in question was selling buccatini at a lower price, a competitor did an analysis, and they found that this company was saving money by skirting regulation that everyone else is complying with. And they did the right thing by forcing the FDA to apply the rules evenly to all companies.
> Now those rules might be perverted to suit protectionist goals, but that’s the whole art of effective hopefully minimalist regulation: it’s very hard to do.
Agreed. I'm not saying there's no rational underpinning to regulation, just that it's frequently gamed by bad actors, almost to the point that the original intent is forgotten.
At 6'1" BMI seems to say I should be between 140lbs and 185 lbs. I'm currently 165 lbs and feel pretty skinny -- I can't imagine being healthy at 140 lbs! The 185 seems about right -- I've been close to 180 lbs and felt like I could lose a few.
I guess people are downvoting because it’s not super relevant to the discussion, but I have a similar opinion that the BMI normal weight range is unreasonable for me.
I’ve been in these two modes:
1) genuinely overweight with too much fat and not enough muscle
2) nearly overweight according to BMI while very fit, with low fat and high muscle. got here from the other state by exercising a lot, losing fat and gaining muscle.
I think I would have to become totally sedentary again to get rid of my muscle
mass and actually reach the lower end of “normal weight” according to BMI, while starving myself and feeling feeble.
> nearly overweight according to BMI while very fit, with low fat and high muscle
Not knowing you personally, it seems statistically more likely to me that your idea of "fit, low fat, high muscle" is what's at fault here (as opposed to BMI). Sure, you could be an exception. But all things being equal, you probably aren't. (Also maybe I misunderstand - if you mean that BMI was saying you were at the high end of normal then ... isn't that just saying that you're fine?)
(Of course if a medical professional or academic specializing in such matters also thought BMI was inaccurate in your case then I would tend to view things differently.)
(Not OP)
I’m not an athlete anymore, but I used to be. It would be physically impossible for me to maintain my muscle mass and have a BMI considered normal, whilst also having a body fat percentage >5%. I know many other (pretty much exclusively taller men) people in the same situation.
I guess it would be interesting to see how those numbers interacted graphically. Are the "bad" areas (ie high muscle mass at reasonable fat percentage) associated with health problems according to experts? Or should people with significantly above average muscle mass be using a different scale instead?
The claim is that BMI does not differentiate between body lean mass and body fat mass. Things like hydrostatic testing are more accurate for determining body fat mass.
I understand the desire to be contrarian, but BMI is widely regarded as totally obsolete with cheap and accurate ways to actually measure body fat percentages.
It’s well understood that BMI is totally wrong for athletes or anyone remotely muscular.
I assure you that's not my motivation at all. I'm not an expert in that field so I tend to trust the metrics used by the health professionals I encounter.
> BMI is widely regarded as totally obsolete
That is not my impression at all, but again I'm not a subject matter expert here. If you have reliable (ie academic or medical) sources I would be interested in learning more about any current preferred metrics.
> totally obsolete with cheap and accurate ways to actually measure body fat percentages
What do you have in mind? With a bit of searching I haven't found much that's cheap. (Obviously you can take some tape or caliper measurements to improve your numbers but that's neither new nor particularly accurate.)
And pretty terrible in my experience (tested two, one noname and one branded, unfortunately forgot the manufacturer/model number).
First, there is a fundamental constrain that it measures impedance only through legs and a little bit of belly, but no upper body (at least here in .cz, no consumer-grade scales have hand electrodes). I do road cycling as the only sport, and therefore get extremely skewed results as I have strong legs, but the rest of the body is much weaker.
Second, the measurements are almost non-repeatable. You get tens of percent difference across measurements, god forbid if you suddenly have moist feet etc. However, both scales used firmware cheating to mask this noise: once you set up a "profile", it will remember the initial value, and then change the following measurements only slightly. However, set up a second profile (preferably with a slightly modified age etc. to prevent advanced firmware cheating) and you get completely different results.
It isn't anywhere near obsolete, not as far as I've seen in both scientific and medical contexts. BMI remains heavily used in many nutritional and disease related studies and remains a common metric in healthcare and public heath.
It's imperfect, but generally correct. More importantly, it's easy to measure. Accurate except for outliers isn't as much of an issue as you think it is, especially as these are generally already accounted for by its users.
I can believe it. I’m curious what typical body types were like in the hunter/gather societies human evolved in, and whether those are ideal for longevity and quality of life in modern society.
The kind of hunt that humans are believed to have practiced early on was persistence hunting, which consists of chasing prey over long distances until they are exhausted (the gazelle can outrun any human on a scale of minutes, but not on a scale of hours).
> and whether those are ideal for longevity and quality of life in modern society
This seems like the real question to me; I assume pre-agrarian humans were biologically optimizing to survive famine. Not being an expert on the subject, I wonder what sort of tradeoffs are associated with intense exercise regimes (and how the balance ultimately comes out with respect to modern society).
Lacking in raw physical power by comparison, sure. But what health issues do we avoid? Do new health issues arise? Optimality in a complex environment is inevitably a nontrivial trade off; we aren't forced to hunt animals with primitive weapons or contend with widespread famine in the modern world.
Assuming you're male, 140 is the lower bound, so, you know, much lower than that might be considered anorexic, but in the 140s is not necessarily unhealthy per se. That's why it's the lower bound.
I am your height and when I was in my 20s, I think I was in the 140s, later I was a little over 200, and now I am just about 185. So the range makes sense to me, but I've never been far from completely sedentary. I know a pro sports player at ~200 would be very skinny. I think Mariano Rivera was an example.
The linked video talks about updating laws regarding the legality of operating the smart summon feature on public roads. I don't see how that can be called "blatant sensationalism".
And you don’t need to go far for this effect. I still to this day remember a beautiful calming moment I had when on a walk in the backyard near a house outside of Portland Maine.
Very true. and although i'm in the midwest you can still find forest preserves, hiking trails, lakes, rivers etc. Get out, find some big wide open space, no other people around. You get to zone in, decompress a little bit. personally i like fishing so i can stand around in silence for hours casting a little bait around trying to bag a fish.
I have an identical experience. Switched to a very light weight zero drop shoe, it forced me to change my stride to more forefoot, and all my shin pain stopped.
I also switched to minimal footwear, it improved my running technique a lot.
The big advantage is that running barefoot or with minimal shoes forces you to run with a foot strike instead of a heel strike. When running with a forefoot strike you use your calves and achilles to absorb the impact, instead of your knees, which was a big help for me. I would always get pain in my knee when running more then 10k, but that is no longer the case.
I can recommend it to everyone who is into running, at least try it a bit, you don't have to run barefoot all the time, but it is really good training.
It takes some time to adjust though, in the beginning my calves and achilles would get really sore after a short run, but after about 6 months of gradually increasing the milage I can run for hours without issues.
Before switching to minimal shoes I ran on zero drop shoes (Altra) for a few months, which I think eased the transition to minimal shoes.
Microsoft has to defer reporting revenue on sales of Windows 10. From their recent investor letter:
"We delivered $90.0 billion in revenue and $22.3 billion in operating income this past fiscal year. Adjusting for Windows 10 revenue deferrals and restructuring expenses, revenue was $96.7 billion with $29.3 billion in operating income."
That is 31% more revenue and 34% more operating income compared to 2012 (the 5 year time period you're citing). Stock backs will also move the price -- there's almost a billion fewer shares outstanding now than there were 5 years ago.
Of course, investors buy companies for future performance and not for past performance. I would suggest that investors like MSFT's current strategy and management considerably more than their past, and as the management continues to increase profits, investors gain more confidence.
In this case, the pasta industry did not want their product confused with the new noodles coming from Nissin; this was back in the days when many Americans may not have readily known the difference between pasta noodles and ramen noodles, and wondered why they were paying more for pasta than they could for ramen.
Now those rules might be perverted to suit protectionist goals, but that’s the whole art of effective hopefully minimalist regulation: it’s very hard to do.
Alternatively, it might be the fact that the pasta company in question was selling buccatini at a lower price, a competitor did an analysis, and they found that this company was saving money by skirting regulation that everyone else is complying with. And they did the right thing by forcing the FDA to apply the rules evenly to all companies.