![]() ![]() However, the calculator asked people to choose between three levels of activity: inactive, moderately active and active. However, the calculator vastly overestimated the impact of very small increases in exercise, encouraging millions of dieters to consume more calories than they needed.Īccording to the NHS’s own guidance, anyone doing less than 150 minutes of exercise per week is considered “inactive”. Tailored advice should have meant that those who were more energetic were given higher calorie requirements than those with “couch potato” lifestyles. People who were deemed to be overweight or obese were then told how many calories to consume daily if they wanted to lose weight. Those using the calculator provided basic details – such as weight, height, and activity levels. ![]() Last year it was the most viewed non-Covid page of all NHS sites, with 22 million visits. ![]() Two in three adults in Britain are overweight or obese. The NHS’s “BMI healthy weight calculator” was put online in 2018, as part of efforts to tackle the country’s obesity epidemic. “Sadly, it will undoubtedly mean that countless people are heavier than they need to be if they followed the calculator’s advice – and it is terrible that the NHS ignored the need to correct its advice for so long,” he said. Tam Fry, chair of the National Obesity Forum, said he was “staggered” the NHS had allowed its calculator to give out inaccurate information for years. It was not until concerns were published in The Lancet this spring that the NHS quietly removed the calculator from its website, putting it back online this month without any calorie advice. Obesity experts told how they warned health officials about the “nonsensical” calculations more than two years ago – yet nothing was done. The NHS’s calculator told anyone whose BMI was 25 or above how many calories they should eat per day if they wanted to gradually lose weight, based on how active they were. A healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, while anything above 25 is considered overweight and above 30 is obese. The errors meant overweight people who walked for just one hour a week were treated as though they were doing such exercise every day.īody Mass Index (BMI) is an indicator of whether someone is a healthy weight for their height. Those following the advice could have consumed 2,086 calories extra per week – equivalent to more than four Big Mac burgers. The errors meant that an overweight man trying to lose weight could be advised to eat almost 300 excess calories per day, with around 240 extra calories allocated to women in the same category. The scale of the blunders was such that a typical dieter could have put on nearly two and a half stone a year by following the instructions given to them by the health service. The NHS “healthy weight” calculator has been wrongly advising overweight people to eat hundreds of excess calories per day, the Telegraph can reveal. ![]()
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