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A staggering number of troops are fat and tired, report says

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A staggering number of troops are fat and tired, report says

A 2018 RAND report on health promotion and disease prevention has painted a grim picture of the military’s physical fitness and sleep standards.

The study, featuring roughly 18,000 randomly selected participants across each of the service branches, showed that almost 66 percent of service members are considered to be either overweight or obese, based on the military’s use of body mass index as a measuring standard.

While the number of overweight service members is a cause for concern, it correlates with the obesity epidemic plaguing the United States, where, as of 2015, one in three young adults are considered too fat to enlist, creating a difficult environment for recruiters to find suitable candidates for military service.

Broken down by service, the 2018 report lists the Army as the branch accounting for the highest percentage of overweight troops, with 69.4 percent of soldiers falling under this category.

https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2018/10/03/a-staggering-number-of-troops-are-fat-and-tired-report-says/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Socialflow+ARM&fbclid=IwAR03KEysmkFsAAxpw9z260HsfD-AgokHn7OtlhtKFEevtwMEBnJqA6m5gSQ
 
BMI is a poor metric that doesn't account for muscle mass.  I suspect this may have to do with it.
 
The Americans also use a waist/neck measure to assist BMI screening, makes it much more effective. No BMI isn't ideal, but its useful in screening large numbers of folks and focusing on the outliers.
 
Here's extract from the RAND report; specifically says the obese results are likely misclassified and they used a straight height/weight method.

.
Weight status in the 2015 HRBS was based on BMI, which was calculated from two
standard items that asked respondents to report their height and weight. We then categorized
BMI into weight status categories using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
criteria. Te CDC calculates BMI as a person’s weight in kilograms (kg) divided by the square
of height in meters (m2) (CDC, 2015a). Te categories for service members aged 20 or older
were as follows:
• underweight (less than 18.5 kg/m2)
• normal weight (18.5–24.9 kg/m2)
• overweight (25.0–29.9 kg/m2)
• obese (30 or more kg/m2).
For service members younger than age 20, weight categories were based on age and sex specific definitions established by the CDC (CDC, 2015b). It is important to note that BMI is
an indirect measure of body fat, and muscular service members may have been misclassifed as
overweight or obese. Recent research on male firefighters, who may be more similar to military
personnel than other occupational cohorts, found significant misclassifcation, both false positive and false negative, of obesity when comparing BMI-based measures with more-sensitive
measures, including percent body fat and waist circumference (Jitnarin et al., 2014).
Weight status results are presented in Tables 4.7 through 4.12. Key fndings inc
 
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