Now on ARD someone mentioned in passing that Germans are the fattest in Europe. Looking it up I find a 2005 document by the International Obesity Task Force:
The study is by the International Association for the Study of Obesity (IASO). It's not exactly in favour of Britain: as a Spiegel article from 2007 puts it:
A study comparing Germany between 1985 and 2002 suggests higher rates than the USA in terms of overweight, with a recent survey suggesting 75% of German men age 25 or over were overweight or obese. This figure is surpassed only in Greece [...] >>
A new study has found that Germany has the highest proportion of overweight people in Europe, partly due to the country's high beer consumption. But Britain, Greece and some Eastern Europe countries have an even higher share of truly obese people.
>>
The Spiegel article has a photo of a fat person ... in Britain. Huh.
The figures, collected from 2002-2004 and presented in 2007, show:
Overweight men (BMI of 25-29.9) - Germany 52.9%, England
43.9%Overweight women (BMI of 25-29.9) - Germany 35.6%, England
34.7%Obese men (BMI above 30) - Germany 22.5%, England 22.7%
Obese women (BMI above 30) - Germany 23.3%, England
23.8%
So the Bild's image of Brits with wabblige Bierbäuche is not quite as fair as you might think?
A more recent article in Bild in April 2009 said that British women have a higher average BMI than German women - the highest in Europe. It described how Thibaut de Saint Pol, a French researcher, studied women from 15 EU countries and said that British ladies' average BMI is 26.2, and German ladies' is 24.
However, de Saint Pol's BMI figures are not original research, but are apparently taken from the EC's Eurobarometer 59.0 - which is from the year 2003: the figures are older than those in the IASO's study.
A more recent Eurobarometer (64.3, from 2006) has Germans with an average weight/height ratio of 0.435 and Brits with a ratio of 0.433, i.e. almost exactly the same.
