Obese Soldiers

Defence stands by obese recruit policy:

The Defence Department is defending its policy of accepting recruits classified as obese.

A Defence Department spokeswoman says it revised entry standards in 2006 to allow applicants with a body mass index of between 30 and 33, which is classed as obese, but recruits must satisfy all other health standards.

It's a good thing too, the BMI is just a measure of how heavy you are in relation to your height, a higher than normal BMI can just as easily mean muscular as fat. It's not hard to find professional fighters that exceed this (though they aren't super common outside of wrestling), and I doubt anyone would claim that Adam Pearce (BMI of 31.41 according to Wikipedia and the ADF's BMI calculator), for example, should be automatically excluded from military service based on some arbitrarily chosen weight cut-off. All soldiers are required to pass a variety of other physical tests, and from my reading of the DefenceJobs site people with a BMI between 30 and 33 also have to take an additional body fat test.

Date: 2010-10-21 23:03:54, 14 years and 65 days ago

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