Dr. Aileen McGloin:

The Chairman is rightly concerned that weight standards may have changed. In the late 1940s, it would be correct to suggest that children in the post-war years were undernourished.

The data on which we base our current BMI standards was collected in the late 1980s or early 1990s, so at the point before the obesity explosion. In a way, that kind of date-stamping of standards is correct for the kind of food environment that we live in now. Even so, we have seen doubling and tripling of obesity rates.