We Should Live - Ben Bateman

From The Telegraph:

A British man who moved to New Zealand has been told by officials that his wife is too fat to join him.

Richie Trezise, 35, a rugby-playing Welshman, lost weight to gain entry to New Zealand after initially being rejected for being overweight and a potential burden on the health care system.

His wife, Rowan, 33, a photographer, has been battling for months to shed the pounds so they can be reunited and live Down Under but has so far been unable to overcome New Zealand’s weight regulations.

Mr Trezise, who moved to Auckland in September after shedding two inches from his waist on a crash diet, said that if his wife was not allowed to come out by Christmas they would abandon the idea of emigrating.

His employer-backed skills visa was initially rejected by immigration officials when they discovered that his body mass index, or BMI, was 42, making him morbidly obese under New Zealand regulations.

BMI measures a person’s weight in relation to their height. Anything over 25 is regarded as overweight, and 30 or above is obese.

Mr Trezise, a submarine cable specialist and a former soldier, said: “My doctor laughed at me. He said he’d never seen anything more ridiculous in his whole life. He said not every overweight person is unhealthy or unfit.

I’m torn on this story.  On the one hand, it’s wonderful that some countries are willing to enforce their immigration laws.On the other hand, Mr. Trezise’s doctor is correct: BMI is ridiculous as a measure of obesity, health, or just about anything else.  It’s simply weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters.  Here’s a simple BMI calculator that’ll handle the metric conversion.

To illustrate the complete silliness of BMI, consider that the average pro football player in the NFL is obese according to the BMI.  They’re not merely overweight; they’re classed as obese.

The BMI also classifies as obese all six of the USA Olympic Team wrestlers in the 120kg class, in freestyle and Greco-Roman.  I’m a pretty big guy myself, as you may have inferred, but I’m sure that any of those six could slam me into unconsciousness without breaking a sweat.  So if anybody out there wants to defend BMI as a rational way to identify the obese, I suggest that they be the ones to go break the bad news to the NFL players and the Olympic wrestling team.