Guybrush

Looking at that page, what one should remember is that quite a few of the nations mentioned are relatively small, for example Bahrain with a population of 1.2 million people who are probably quite culturally alike are compared to a nation like USA which comprises over 300 million people and everywhere from really poor people to very rich people in very different cultures.

I'm sure if you split up America into different cultures or geographical regions and so on, you would find different groups of people that would vary a lot. Some of them would be tremendously fat I'm sure while others would probably be much thinner.

Also, the test seems to be for obesity rather than people being fat and although the correlation between fat and obese is probably quite similar across borders, if you only look at obesity, you could perhaps in theory have a country where 100% of the population is fat but they don't make the list because not enough of them are obese.

Furthermore, the guy who published it to his blog has done his own calculations. It's not scientific studies - or at least we don't know the sources for the data.

Fun, but think before you swallow it whole.

edit :

I argued that certain trends in big nations like America may not be well represented in such nation-wide statistics. Here's an example :

source : Epidemiology of obesity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ~ "International Obesity Task Force" (PDF). March 15 2005. http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_determ...ts/iotf_en.pdf. Retrieved 2008-09-19.

Judging by that bit of info, afro-american women seem to blow those Quatar first-placers right out of the water.

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