Center for Disease Control

The FBI — very secret in its workings — is in the spotlight. Who knew that our tax dollars support 35,000 employees and a budget of $8 billion! Then there’s the CDC with a budget of $7 billion and 15,000 employees. Fortunately, our U.S. Patent & Trademark Office doesn’t cost us a dime — their 10,000 employees are paid from the fees charged to inventors!

We think of the CDC as the agency to deal with a pandemic or a virus like Zika. But they also monitor our bodies and have been doing so since 1957. And they respond to inquiries:

Thank you for your inquiry to CDC-INFO. We apologize for the delay in responding to your email. Your request for information on Obesity statistics was forwarded to subject-matter experts at the appropriate CDC program. We hope you find their response helpful.

Body Mass Index (BMI) is a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. Thus, it is possible to have decimal point (rather than even numbers). Weights that are provided in the charts are examples. To calculate exact BMI for an individual, you can use DNPAO’s BMI calculator at https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/adult_bmi/english_bmi_calculator/bmi_calculator.html

For example, if a women’s height is 5 feet 6 inch and her weight is 185 lb, her BMI is 29.9 and it falls in Overweight category.

Just looking at the CDC chart shows that the allowances between categories start to increase as one becomes heavier — the spread of 5 pounds goes to 9! If you are between overweight and obese you can just choose your group! Unfortunately for our tax funded CDC, the rules changed last week when the BVI https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1215572920# was launched. This BVI represents a ten year partnership of the Mayo Clinic and the Medical Research Council in the UK. Soon the total picture including hip to waist ratio; visceral fat; abdominal volume and more will be public. We are going to get the real facts — not the CDC’s politically correct version. What is this going to do for our health insurance projections? Invalidate them all.