Every Columbus Day we close the doors to the Courthouse and conduct an “in-service” day. There is usually an overarching theme and this year it is all about health.
As part of this health theme, we were invited to take a web-based health assessment survey. The survey then provides results and recommendations based on your answers. Pretty standard stuff.
I carefully read my results and was not surprised when it said I was “obese” since it uses BMI as the measure for that. BMI is really only useful (in my opinion) in assessing a very narrow range of people. Those of us who actually work out and have, you know, muscles, tend to read as overweight/obese. So their “obese” verbiage I can live with. I would prefer if they could somehow measure body fat, but that is a bit more difficult. There are ways to estimate body fat based on some simple measurements, and although those methods are prone to some errors I think it would be preferable to BMI. But I guess that’s just me.
What got me going was the recommendations for caloric intake. I’m a pretty average guy in a lot of ways. I’m around 5′10″, sort of athletic build (certainly not Lou Ferrigno), and am pretty active. So I was really surprised when the survey recommended just over 2000 calories per day for me.
So I sent a indignant note off to the folks that put the survey together and, surprisingly, they replied back. In their reply the gave their method for calculating daily calorie needs. A little reseach on my part and I found a glaring problem with the calculation - it assumes that everyone taking the assessment is a couch potato.
When I recalculated the results for me I came up with over 3000 calories per day or about a 50% increase over their recommendations - hardly a trivial error.
To their credit, when I presented my findings to them, they agreed to change the survey to incorporate activity level in their calculations.
What I found astonishing was that, according to them, I was the first person in five years that had commented on the results of the survey. Unbelievable - for 5 years people had been blindly following (or, more likely, ignoring) the recommendations of this survey - this incorrect survey.
Ok, rant done.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment