Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Harvard loves me as I am

I'm playing around with a bunch of calculators on the website of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention, and am generally pleased by the results: I'm low risk for every form of cancer they've got, except for melanoma because I'm a peelie-wallie pasty white Celt. The wierd thing is that, for the cancers where risk is affected by being overweight...the website is saying "well done, you are not overweight". I put in correct height/weight stats, and every other website I've asked has said "overweight" or even *gulp* "obese". I think I'm right on the borderline between those two categories if you go by the highly flawed BMI chart.

Meh. So Harvard think's I'm not overweight. I'm tempted to play with the weight data to see at what point they would consider me overweight.

HAH! OK, the CANCER risk calculators don't think I'm overweight, but the DIABETES risk calculator does. I guess cancer is linked to more extreme levels of overweight.

Now I'm going to go pull faces at the Diabetes Risk Calculator, cause it called me a fatty.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The World Health Organization estimates cancer is 60-80% environmental. Namely, eat right, exercize, there's still all kinds of toxins that are gonna jump in your bod and kill you.

Genes and family history are nice, they give you a clue where you might want to look first, but that's about it.

Dad's been consulting a painter at his former workplace. "Painters don't get to retire." What a frightning statement. Work work work, med problems hit at 50ish, then *splat.*

I just hope you aren't working with too many nasty chemicals without adiquate protection. And that your water pipes aren't full of toxins. Or your food.