The Weight of Evidence

From a week email I get called "This is True":

A spokesman for France's Alstom Chantiers, the company that supplied the Queen Mary II cruise liner with its furniture, has admitted it is having to replace many of the chairs on the luxury liner because they're breaking under the weight of fat passengers. "There are some problems with the chairs because some of our passengers are heavier than we imagined," the spokesman says. "It's not an English problem," he hastened to add, since the QMII is a British ship. "It's probably more American."

That's funny, but I thought the more interesting part was this:

Meanwhile, a study by Australia's University of Adelaide has found that the average Australian is heavier than the average American. They found the average Aussie woman wears size 16 and weighs 8 kg (17.6 lbs) more than American women, and the average Aussie man is 3 kg (6.6 lbs) heavier than American men. A doctor for the Australian Medical Association says "we are eating ourselves to death," but University of Adelade Prof. Maciej Henneberg says the "few kilos" of weight is "not a major concern."

Now those weights are not standardized to height in the form of a Body Mass Index (BMI), but it is still a rather telling commentary on their weight problem... and even more telling is their attitude about it (I don't think there are many if any academics here who think the US doesn't have a weight problem).