Garth George: Those weighted figures do us a fat lot of good

Don't you get thoroughly sick of having figures thrown at you for which no justification is given? It happens almost every day in the media when various "experts" or single-issue obsessives try to convince us that their cause is just.

Invariably preceded by "new research shows ... "or "in a new report ...", these prognostications never seem to be backed up by any empirical evidence.

Rather, they give the impression that the "researchers" have developed a preconceived notion, then scratched around to find "evidence" to prove their point.

It happens invariably on issues which affect the way we live - health, education, climate change, for example - in which so-called research statistics are used as emotional blackmail or to frighten us into a state of paranoia.

The latest example of this downright dishonesty appeared in this newspaper on Tuesday under the headline "Kiwis the third fattest in new report on obesity".

The story, given out by "healthcare lobbyists", said that an OECD Health Care Data 2009 report, covering just 30 of the world's nations, concluded that the obesity rate among adults in New Zealand was 26.5 per cent.

This, it said, compared with 25 per cent in 2003 and 18 per cent in 1997.

Yet nowhere in this story - or for that matter in any other I've read on this subject - was obesity defined. And nowhere is it explained how this figure was arrived at.

Did the "researchers", for instance, weigh every New Zealander to obtain their result?

I was, the last time I weighed myself (I haven't been weighed by anyone else for years), my usual three or four kilograms above the weight prescribed by my body mass index (BMI) by which obesity seems to be judged.

However, years ago a physician told me that the BMI was a totally unreliable gauge for obesity because it ignored all sorts of factors which vary according to gender, bone structure, age and so on.

Taking all things into account, he set me a target weight and I've pretty much stuck to it since.

So am I judged to be obese? And, if so, how on Earth could anyone but me know?

Or do those who "research" such things merely stand on the streets and count the number of Kiwis who walk past with bums reminiscent of the back of a bus and/or bellies hanging like a veranda over their belts?

The story, of course, was used as an argument against the Government's quite reasonable and proper cuts in the money thrown by its predecessor at the alleged obesity epidemic.

To the relief of many of us the Government has lifted the restrictions on what food and drink can be sold in schools, got rid of district health board staff who advised schools on nutrition policy, stopped funding the tunnel-visioned Obesity Action Coalition, and scrapped an anti-obesity programme for children.

But most importantly, the Government has dumped a sinister and thoroughly undemocratic Public Health Bill that would have allowed it to rewrite food industry recipes and control placement of "unhealthy" food in supermarkets.

And it has told DHBs to stick to their knitting and forget about trying to boost fruit and vegetable consumption.

Behind much of the shonky "science" we've seen in recent years has been the Green Party, which would have difficulty staying in Parliament were it not for paranoia it manages to engender among the impressionable and the ignorant about many things environmental.

And, true to form, Green MP Sue Kedgley features in the story about the OECD report. It was estimated, she said, that there were 8000 preventable deaths a year down to poor nutrition and obesity, and the annual cost to the health system of obesity and diabetes had been estimated at $900 million and was forecast to rise to $1.3 billion in the next eight years.

The only words in what she had to say that have any significance are "estimated" and "forecast". Here we have a perfect example of the bullshit that is paraded before us on this subject and others time and time again.

We are not told by whom these estimates and forecasts were manufactured, nor are we given any scientific or empirical evidence that these figures are anywhere near the mark. It is, as is so often the case, all smoke and mirrors.

When it comes to smoke and mirrors, the education unions and the Principals' Federation have taken them up with gusto in their opposition to the Government's plan to assess the progress of primary school children in maths, reading and writing against Government-set standards.

For instance, they talk about such standards acting against schools fostering self-esteem and confidence in their pupils, which blithely ignores the fact that without adequate literacy and numeracy skills, neither self-esteem nor confidence is possible.

As someone once said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."