With another year starting, gyms will be full, shoes purchased, and salads will be ordered as people start new year’s resolutions.
But although Cosmos can’t guarantee you’ll stick to your resolutions, we’ve spoken to the science experts who’ve provide some advice of what to avoid.
Earlier in the year, we produced the “Debunks” podcast series with NinePodcasts. The first series was all about electric vehicles; while the second series was all about weight, with host Matthew Ward Agius trying to uncover if anything in the diet and fitness world was actually worth doing.
He looked into myths surrounding the BMI, fitness trackers, diets, and Ozempic.
The first episode is available below.
One of the weirdest things we discovered in that episode is the origin of the Body Mass Index (BMI).
The simple arithmetic of the BMI is based on a system devised by 19th-century Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, who was an early pioneer of the social sciences and the use of data to understand human trends.
His ‘Quetelet Index’ was described in 1832 and was used to try to identify a calculation for the ‘average man’, first by conducting cross-sectional studies of infants and then adults.
But in the 70s – 1970s that is – researchers were looking for a quick way to measure health, mortality and morbidity. They rebranded Quetelet’s formula as the BMI in 1972.
If you want to know even more about weight, subscribe to Debunks on your favourite podcast platform below.
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Originally published by Cosmos as Want to lose weight in the new year? Here’s a podcast to help bust myths
Jacinta Bowler
Jacinta Bowler is a science journalist at Cosmos.
They were published in the Best Australian Science Writing 2023.
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