Long-Run Changes in the Body Mass Index of Adults in Three Food-Abundant Settler Societies: Australia, Canada and New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We identify changes in body mass index (BMI) since the 19th century, for three British-origin, food abundant, settler societies: Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The onset of sustained BMI increase came later in these societies than in the US. New Zealand shows a distinctive pattern of within-country gender differences. The gap between Australian Canadian males (leading) and female BMIs remains large with some increases in the gap in the 35-39 year age group, but narrowing in the 45-49 range especially in Australia. In contrast, the BMI of both sexes in New Zealand has effectively converged for most age ranges (although it has been similar for the 45-49 age range since 1977). In terms of cross-country comparisons, the results show a remarkably similar long-term pattern for males in all three countries although the absolute differences between leading BMI countries has changed over time culminating in New Zealand being the ‘top ranked’ obese country for males in the 20-49 age group. For females the pattern and trends are quite different, with New Zealand women exceeding the BMI of same aged females in Australia and Canada from the 1980s onwards. If anything the results suggest that New Zealand female BMI continues to grow while that of Australia may be leveling off.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".