Amusing Twitter banter on the subject of obesity set me into a brief spell of reading the detailed page on the subject on Wikipedia.

It’s interesting and scary stuff, and it teaches me that I am Class I Obese, which, in the words of the page when I read earlier in the week, means:

“A BMI of over 32 is associated with a doubling of risk of death”

Good lord, really? I’m twice as likely to die? Doubly certain?

I was pretty sure that what was said was not what was meant, so queried it on the talk page, and it was clarified the following morning as a doubling in the mortality rate. That’s better – twice as many people per 1,000 population die who are obese as compared to the normal weight population. It’s still not a particularly useful statistic for judging personal risk.

The other really fascinating thing on the page was this picture of two abdominal CT scans, showing the difference on a slice of person that the extra weight makes.