Donald Trump is the new US president. Andhra CM Naidu wants to give tickets to those who have got more than 2 children in local self-government elections. TN CM Stalin has declared an award of 1 million dollars to a person who deciphers the Indus Script.
An eighth Pay Commission for Central Govt employees is announced after a long gap. UGC has issued guidelines to appoint new VCs of varsities with their representative in the search panel. Forest fires have created problems for next Olympics in California. Bangladesh does not want the word ‘secular’ in their Constitution.
No wonder, BMI (Body Mass Index) is to be replaced by a new formula for obesity. Persons may be tall, short, broad, slim, and all are normal. But Adolphe Quetelet did not like the variability. The statistician in him ached to neatly quantify the ‘normal man’. So the astronomer and expert in numbers Quetelet created an index in 1832. He divided a person’s weight by the square of his/her height. This index came to be known as BMI since 1972.
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The health formula is simple. If your BMI is over 25, you are overweight. You are obese if it is over 30. Height 5 feet and weight 70 kg is considered obese. Sitting for too long results in weight increase. It can cause diabetes, heart trouble and cancer. So the Lancet panel has called for defining obesity in better terms, such as the waist to hip ratio.
This is the beginning of a new order in 2025 for a definition of fitness and fatness or obesity. A study found that 70% of India’s urban population was already overweight or obese. The rising consumption of ultra-processed foods could make the problem worse. That is why a better measure of obesity – one that distinguishes between fat and muscle, abdominal fat and other types, and takes into account differences of race and sex – would be welcome.
In India, a debate is going on whether to increase working hours up to 90 per week. There is an outrage about business leaders – most notably Infosys founder Narayan Murthy and L&T CEO SN Subramanyan – exhorting Indians to put in long working hours. A section of industry leaders and psychologists feel the fatigue will set in due to long working hours resulting in loss of quantity and quality of the product.
Along with Donald Trump, new order in BMI, working hours, deciphering of the Indus script and demand for more children, specially in South India is the frontier on which the attention of thinking public will be diverted in 2025. So the saying is apt: old order changeth yielding place to new and God fulfills himself in many ways.