Wesley Stevenson

speaker

1,470 appearances 54 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2010 last heard May 2015

Wesley Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Fat or Fiction · 28 Jan 2013 podcast

It's 54 kilograms. voice-verified

And I also need your height. voice-verified

BMI, as it's known, is calculated by dividing your weight by your height squared. voice-verified

OK. voice-verified

So what's your height? voice-verified

1.74 metres. voice-verified

So you have a BMI of 18. voice-verified

Would you like a doughnut? voice-verified

And this is the controversy with BMI. voice-verified

It's not always that good a measure when applied to individuals, and a new formula has been proposed which apparently irons out some of the flaws. voice-verified

It's been put forward by mathematician Professor Nick Trefethen from Oxford University in the UK, and it's had a lot of coverage worldwide. voice-verified

When you were trying to recalculate it and come up with the better figure, did you go back and look at the sort of samples of people in order to try to calculate what would be the best numbers? voice-verified

Well, on the whole, it means that some tall people previously deemed overweight are now normal, and some short people who were normal are now overweight. voice-verified

Yes, calculating your BMI with the new method, your score drops from 18 to 17.8. voice-verified

Yeah, afraid so, but as Nick Trefethen has pointed out, he's a mathematician and doesn't have a medical background. voice-verified

So I asked for a second opinion from Tim Cole, Professor of Medical Statistics at University College London in the UK. voice-verified

But first I wanted to know, what is BMI and what does it actually tell us? voice-verified

So looking at Professor Nick Trefethen's new equation for BMI, what do you make of it? voice-verified

Well, I asked Professor Cole that, and he said they were proposed in the mid-1980s by two scientists, Garrow and Webster. voice-verified

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