Obesity Rampant in NFL, Study Says
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Associated Press
It's no secret that size matters in the National Football League, but a new study suggests that a whopping 56 percent of NFL players would be considered obese by some medical standards.
The NFL called the study bogus for using players' body-mass index (search), a height-to-weight ratio that doesn't consider body muscle versus fat. The players' union said that despite the familiar sight of bulging football jerseys, there's no proof that obesity is rampant in the league.
But former defensive tackle John Jurkovic said he's seen plenty of evidence that players have gotten not just bigger but sometimes fatter, "big as houses" in recent years because of league pressure to intimidate opponents and win.
"The NFL teams want it because it's working," said Jurkovic, who played for Green Bay, Cleveland and Jacksonville before retiring in 2000.
The theory is that bigger men, especially linemen and defensive players, are better blockers and harder to move.
But the study results suggest that bigger players don't make a team more successful.
Rest of the article. . .
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,149131,00.html
Of course, many professional boxers are also technically "obese" the night of their big fights. . .which (although America is indeed a pretty "big" country in more ways than one) often makes me skeptical of the figures that I hear about our population.
