It seems to me that there is a growing tendency in this country now to take anything said by an ‘expert’ with several ounces of salt. Maybe this is because people are beginning to wake up to the current glaring searchlight on the financial industry and are realizing that the people in black Armani suits with power ties are the creeps who have been taking the public for a ride as suckers for years.

No action was taken, you notice, until the mess began to affect the millionaires and billionaires. And now we are expected to believe that the same black Armani suits and power ties are going to get us out of the mess they created. And it’s the Armani crowd who are going to be helped out, at the expense of the people they cheated, so they can do it again with other schemes. Liberty and justice for all. Hurray!

Many of my acquaintances are also beginning to think twice when the white coated experts tell them how to become bankrupt with medical treatment, and a friend of theirs used a herbal remedy and is now symptom free. And certainly a large proportion of my conferees began to make progress after doubting the ability and agenda of a black robed expert.

It was following this train of thought that brought me a mental link to the tools used by the ‘experts’ who cheat us 24/7 as a matter of course.

The Armani suits create complex financial schemes fixed up by conniving lawyers to separate the ordinary person from their money or real estate under the spin of being helpful.

The black robes use ancient, obsolete and thoroughly manipulated versions of old writings to add guilt to the lives of their flock and cash to the collection plate.

The white coated medical ‘experts’ use carefully prepared tables of data so that they can measure some statistic of yours and tell you how abnormal you are. It doesn’t occur to most patients that the doctor is used to seeing sick people. His averages and normals aren’t those of the healthy population who avoid him.

When I was a young athlete in Britain the medical profession were adamantly against weight lifting because of the damage it did to bodies. The reason for this opinion was simply that ALL the weight lifters who were their patients were people like stevedores and dock workers who had hurt themselves on the job, usually because they weren't scientific weight lifters. All the heavy weight lifters were just potential hernia patients to the doctors. They never saw the trained lifters. Their universe was sick people.

When a student of mine asked my opinion about his career I told him to get into the health care business because there were so few people in it. When he talked about doctors and nurses I pointed out that they were in the disease care business. People who kept people healthy and away from doctors were in the health care business. Names are often very deceptive in this country of advertising geniuses. Collateral damage for example.

One particular tool of the medicos and their accomplices in bankruptcies, the insurance companies is a set of tables called the BMI index. I remember being very incensed a few years ago when Dr. Atkins died. Whatever you may think of Dr. Atkins, his diet worked wonders for thousands of people. There is no one single diet that will fit everyone because of the blood group differences, but his diet made people look at what they were eating, and think about what they were eating, and form intentions about fitness that were absent before his work.

So, from my point of view Atkins was a benefactor to thousands. In this country the most important news is always negative, and news people dig, sometimes desperately to find something negative to say about celebrated people, unless of course they provide advertising revenue to the publication for which they dig.

One case you will all remember as a prime example, before we get to the creep who tried to knock Atkins, remember Dean and his scream?

Candidate Dean used a special microphone to cut out interference from crowd noise. To people in his audience in front of him his now famous scream was scarcely audible, it was feedback. But the networks played it over, 633 times in four days. Just like they did with the Twin Towers…Mooney type brainwashing for a receptive audience, apparently without off switches to their TV’s and radios. Only one channel mentioned the microphone. That explanatory fact certainly wasn’t repeated 633 times in four days. Only the opportunity to hurt or humiliate was important.

Then when I got on AOL in February 2004 I saw a picture of Doctor Atkins and a gloating little sneer of a headline that said, Atkins Died Obese.

Now that was enough to rile me a little, but then I read on and found that the doctor (the white coated expert) who said this, was not the doctor of Atkins, didn’t know him or his medical condition at death, and had used the BMI tables to make his pronouncement. Now that really lit the fire. Atkins died of a disease with a symptom of major water retention. The ‘expert’ was probably jealous of Atkin’s success and got his jab in when Atkins couldn’t reply to it.

BMI means the Body Mass Index. It is an absolutely stupid index that disregards, like so many official indexes, all of the really essential facts and circumstances.

And you had better know something about it because the insurance companies use the same piece of nonsense to judge how much to charge you, and all the government health agencies use the same piece of nonsense for their statistics about you too.

One medical friend of mine calls it BMI—Bungling Medical Ignorance

The index tables say that if your index has the value of 25 or over, you are overweight. If your index is 30+ you are obese.

I repeat…the tables that the creepy doctor used to call Atkins obese are the ones that the insurance companies and all government health agencies use for you too. Read on.

Here are a few people that you might know, with their BMI’s and what the same creep of a doctor would say from reading the tables. You probably know from experience that he wouldn’t bother to look at the people concerned, only the paper records. This will show you how ridiculous the index is.

Arnold Schwarzenegger when he won the Mister Universe competitions, and could make every muscle visible in the best developed physique in the world, five consecutive times, was 6 ft 2 inches tall and weighed 257 lbs. His BMI of 33 says he was VERY OBESE.

Arnold also won the Mr. Olympia title seven times. Here are two of his competition measurements: Chest 57 inches, Waist 34 inches. And BMI says he is VERY OBESE.

How many obviously obese MEN do you know who have a waist of 34 inches. Obese people have prominent waists called bellies. One contrary fact can sink a theory. Arnold has sunk the theory that the BMI is a valid measure of body fat. But here are a couple more bullets for the corpse.

Sammy Sosa is 6ft 0 inches and weighs 220 lbs. His BMI of 30 says he is Obese

Harrison Ford in his prime was 6ft 1 inch and weighed 218 lbs. His BMI of 29 made him Overweight

Brad Pitt, one of the fittest of actors in the Hollywood Hunk category is 6 ft 0 inches and weighs 203 lbs. So his BMI of 27 shows doctors that he is Overweight

Michael Jordan, in training, was 6 ft 6inches and 216 lbs. His BMI of 25 tabs him as Overweight to medical and insurance bureaucrats

Now you can see how stupid this whole system is. The BMI is supposed to show the proportion of your body weight that is composed of fat. BUT it doesn’t differentiate between fat and muscle. The index is based ONLY on your height and weight. But a given volume of muscle weighs much more than the same volume of fat.

Some people use weight training exercises to lose weight. They get thinner at first, and look and feel better and stronger, but haven’t lost weight. The large volume of fat they took off was counterbalanced by the small volume of muscle they put on. When I ran a little weight training club in London I often heard the complaint that “I’m putting on weight, not losing it.” My reply was always, “Forget the scales. Look in the mirror. When you came in here you were carrying the weight. Now the weight is muscle and is carrying you.”

If you have a muscular build your BMI is obviously a totally worthless indication of anything at all, except the stupidity of people who just read tables without knowing anything about what the data in the tables represents. Like the ones who look at the monitors instead of at the patient.

An enormous percentage of Americans are obese, says officialdom. They may be right, but if they base their pronouncements on the BMI, their perceived percentage may contain some high class weight lifters, body builders and athletes.

About 80% of your body’s chemical composition involves water. Dozens of so-called diseases and syndromes disappear completely when people drink enough water, not fluoridated water of course…that causes problems.

Your liver and other internal organs are water-based tissues. They weigh more than fat. Anybody who has bought meat knows that a given volume of red meat and the organ meats weigh more than the same volume of fat

So if you happen to have a larger liver than usual, even if you are as fit as Brad Pitt, the person looking only at the tables could call you overweight or obese. And if you aren’t wearing a white coat your views will not be listened to. Yet your liver may be just the size you need. A smaller one is not necessarily a better deal for your health.

Every front has a back, and the bigger the front the bigger the back, says the proverb. That applies to the opposite circumstances of organ size. As people age their organs quite often are made less effective because they shrink, and some of their tissues are replaced with fat. So the organs become less efficient, contain more fat, and weigh less. The man who reads your tables thinks your BMI has improved because you weigh less. Only the BMI has improved, not your health.

Now the percentage of fat to lean muscle mass in your body IS an important thing to know for your health’s sake. The ratio of your lean muscle mass to body fat is worth knowing as an index of your fitness. But the BMI is a worthless indicator. What then can you use yourself?

A simple test is to check the difference between your waist and your hip circumference. Put the tape around your waist at the navel, without sucking in, and do the same around the hips. For men a difference of one inch or more in the two measurements is an indication of fair condition. More is better. For women about three inches is fair.

That still isn’t an accurate measurement, only a statement of overall body proportions, and possible health. To find the ratio of lean muscle to fat the best cheap way for people is the Skin Fold test. To do this you use special calipers, and nip the skin about the iliac crest…the ridge of the pelvic bone above the hip, where the waist should rightfully begin. The measure of the amount of skin between the calipers can be a very good indicator of your body muscle/fat ratio.

If you get on line and ask Google to tell you about ‘Accu-Measure’ it will show you sites where you can buy amazingly accurate calipers cheaply, with a book of tables. The results you get are as accurate as some very expensive instruments used by your doctor, who would charge you a lot to do once, what you could do at home as many times as you like. Prices vary slightly for the same calipers. The ones I use go today for around $8.00. When I bought them many, many years ago they cost about $4.95. Clearly, they last and last.

The caliper system is cheap and accurate, and if you are a picky person then you can use the calipers on the waist, hips and under the arms on the tricep muscle, add up the numbers, divide by three and use the average.

The numbers you get will actually MEAN something. As they go down it is a clear indication of improving bodily condition in a healthy person. You can use the tables in books, which I used to do, or go to the web site of an ingenious statistician who has found an algorithm that gives the same results as the best tables to within 1%. You just pop in your latest figure and age and he’ll pop up the result with a mini report on your condition.

The calipers part of his fitness site is www.hussman.org/fitness/caliper.htm

I found him because I lost the tables that came with my calipers. The book on how to use them only costs $3 at some places advertised on the Web, but I liked the mathematician’s approach.

Perhaps my little pique at the mean spiritedness, and possible ignorance of the authority of the comment about Atkins may help you. I hope so. But that is not all.

Whenever I write about the amazing anomalies, outright deceptions and deficiencies in the medical world, or the food industry, some people are incredulous that such things could possibly be allowed. So often they just go into denial…“My government would never allow that to happen. They want the best for me ” is a pretty standard response.

It isn’t so. Here is a piece of trivia that just about EVERYONE today can relate to in this country. The keyboard of your writing machine is likely to have QWERTY on the top keys. Your keyboard was designed decades ago, in the last century, to SLOW down the quick typist. Some of you will remember how those little type blocks that used to slap through the ribbon and mark the paper would sometimes bunch up and jam if you typed really fast.

Your keyboard was DESIGNED to be inefficient. Because of the inertia of the levers in the machines a human typist could be faster than the mechanical parts of the machine. In this century, and for a few decades, that hasn’t been true.. Nowadays on electric typewriters and computer keyboards most of the time is spent with the machine waiting for you. This inefficient keyboard is now not needed.

The best way to have the keys arranged is obviously to have the home keys as the letters that are used most often in the language. This frequency varies from language to language and the order of the English frequencies ETAIONS has been known for well over a hundred years. As schoolboys we used them to solve coded messages.

I sometimes type for several hours a day and a few years ago began to get pains in the wrist ligaments. Immediately I did research on this, and found that in experiments on hand movements to type a given piece of work, the results varied enormously. One large article took 11 miles of finger movements using the QWERTY keyboard and 2.3 miles using another layout, the Dvorak layout, based on letter frequencies. I immediately changed my keyboard preference from the Control Panel…Keyboard to Dvorak U.S., learned that layout and used it. Took about an hour of typing, “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and I had it well enough to type as fast as I could on QWERTY, and then speeded up every day after for a couple of weeks.

My keyboard now has AOEUID as the home keys on my left hand and HTNS- as the home keys on my right, whatever the labels on the keys say. With these home keys alone I can type over 120 different words. You try that with ASDFG HJKLS: on the ‘normal’ keyboard. My typing is much faster and much less stressful.

The QWERTY keyboard is only ‘normal’ because schools still use it. EVERY speed record in typing in the world is held by people who use this Dvorak keyboard, as it is called. My already rapid speed increased as soon as I knew the layout, by some 50 words a minute more, with less work. But still the QWERTY is the one produced by the millions, for the millions who won’t look for something better. The typist’s tool is VERY inefficient, but the majority still use it.

The BMI index is very inefficient in the job it is meant to perform. But the majority still use it, and don’t even think of questioning it.

And here is another tool that isn’t understood by the users. A police officer used a radar gun to ticket a driver going over the speed limit. He must have been speeding because the machine said so. The driver however objected and was asked by a lawyer how he could deny the evidence of the machine. He pointed out that one good reason was that he was the inventor of it, and that the policeman was totally ignorant of the physics involved and was in his little hiding place unaware that the fence behind the passing cars was screwing up the accuracy of the radar bounce. The tool only does as well as the skill of the user. Which in these modern times may be nil.

The astrologer monk Placidus has a House System in astrology named after him. Many of you I know have astrology charts that say Placidus House System on the top. He was born in 1604. For three centuries his House System was the one used by everyone because it was the ONLY one that came with mathematical tables to assist in the tedious calculations. There were many other systems available, some considered far superior for various reasons, but his was the most popular because of the tables for three hundred years.

Because the BMI tables were made available and insurance companies used them because they saved calculations, and looked scientific, they took on an authority of their own. Now everybody uses them instead of looking for something better, and without even considering that the results of reading the tables are pretty meaningless numbers.

It’s the pseudo precision of the numbers that overawes people, even though the results would be equivalent to adding the digits of the phone numbers of a thousand people, taking an average and saying, “This is the average phone number. If yours is bigger you need treatment.” You might try that on credulous friends, quoting recent research. Don’t be surprised if they take you seriously. They might be secret fans of Palin.

It should be clear by now that just because something is widely used or well known does NOT mean automatically it is the best, or even that it works. Some of the best cures in the health field are the cheapest and with the least, or even zero side effects. But they can’t be patented. The expensive ones are patented and marketed.

Keep alert. Look out for yourself. You cannot expect a politician or any other kind of salesman to do it for you. And most of the ‘experts’ you encounter are salesmen in one form or another. You MUST think outside the box that public consensus and Madison Avenue has graciously labeled, “This is your life.” It could be, but that’s up to you.