Male Speaker: What is the difference between overweight and obesity?
William McCarthy: The true definition medically of overweight and obesity is defined by a term we call the BMI or Body Mass Index. Mathematically, this is calculated by taking a person s weight in pounds and multiplying it times 703 and dividing it by their height which would be inches and we square that. Then we arrive at a number and so, what we do, we define this really more to research but a person who have a BMI of 30 would be considered obese.
Obese means a person is at risk for a number of diseases. Overweight is a BMI of greater than 25. Generally, overweight becomes a problem when it is associated with other situations such as diabetes or hypertension. So, what we try to do is to ideally get every one down to a BMI of 25 or less. Now, we also have some subcategories we call morbid obesity or medically severe obesity, this would be a BMI of 40.
This is a very medically severe problem with a very high mortality rate, marked increase in rates of a lot of diseases associated with obesity. We also categorize people between a BMI between 30 and 35 is category one. It is not quite severe these are people who are quite overweight, but they are not in the highest category of overweight.
We have category two which is a BMI between 35 and 40. This is a more severe problem and the more problems that we add onto obesity and overweight, the more risk a person entails.
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