If you think that is bad can you imagine the health costs.

This is why the country can't afford NHI.

Instead of talking about NHI the good Doctor Gomez should be trying to get the Bahamian people to be more healthy.

Must make healthy food an affordable option

A little good news: the study was wrong. First, the BMI is a miserable, inaccurate measurement. Second, all the studies of the BMI are based on Caucasians, who tend to be shorter and more broadly built than Bahamians. Third, the BMI is not a measure of fat. It is a ratio of height to weight, and nothing more.

I'm a mathematician who has studied obesity for over a decade, and I spent two years developing a scientific alternative to the BMI. My algorithm uses body stats, health history, exercise history, and lifestyle, and then calculates a range of healthy weight for each person. You can find it at www.weightzonefactor.com It is free - I'm happily retired.

A fitness club owner is trying to get the government to subsidize fitness?

I am shocked.

A person should be held responsible for his/her own health ......... if you don't take care of your body, you should pay the price .............. why should the government or a private company pay for your personal bad eating, drinking, sexing and partying habits?????

Why do we believe that someone must always take care of our slackness??????

There are many reasons. The first being that the government is trying to bring in NHI, so therefore a person's bad health is now everyone's problem. The second is that people who are in bad health tend to take more sick days, have lower productivity and produce a lower quality of work. Companies invest lots of money into many of their employees through on the job training and having a healthy employee gives a better return on that investment.

You are correct that there is a mentality that other people will take care of our slackness, and that is something that needs to change. We have a problem in this country with taking responsibility.

If the government insists on NHHI then it should be funded by taxes on unhealthy meals like Kentucky Fried chicken, fries, sodas etc. not from the salaries of the already over taxed worker.

There was a study done by University of Pittsburgh,which suggested that has a person becomes overweight or obese the actual size and function of their brain decreases. This study has allowed researches to coin the term " the dinosaur syndrome"-Big body little brain.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-am…

Some Bahamians need to do better and make proper food choices. A conch snack, chicken snack or any "snack" for that matter drowned in wesson oil with fries and a roll is not a complete meal.
You are what you eat! If you eat garbage then you'll look like garbage.

Like the chinese proverb says, "Ignorance will not kill you, but it will make you sweat alot." Plenty Bahamians are "sweating" with high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer.

Mr. Quant has a point here as every time there is a gathering of people , say junkanoo,
etc, the first comment ,especially if you are watching it on television is the amount of fat people we have. One of my friends like to say that we may have 350,000 people.but weight-
wise we have over 600.000,

The question should be, "Who can AFFORD to eat healthy?" Look at the price controlled crap, and then look at the price of Healthy greens and other foods. That will tell you right there why Bahamians are fat.

Shouldn't need to perform a "study" to realize that being overweight or obese affects productivity and therefore profit. All one has to do is open there eyes and watch a fat person move. if someone has even the slightest of a belly you know they are slow moving, they don't exercise or look after themselves, they don't eat right and therefore have little energy. Anyone that doesn't look after themselves properly is certainly not able to look after anything or anyone else properly.

If anyone in government really cared about the people, the first thing they would do is to ban all tobacco, junk food, soda, fast food and manufactured food, despite capitalist losses. Then they would fix the education system to include thorough coverage of health and fitness related knowledge. Then of course they could keep going and fix the rest of the education system etc etc

but nobody cares! That's proven every day!

The damn heat affects productivity. That's why customer service is so disengaged. All people can do is smolder all day. LOWER ENERGY BILLS AND WATCH A TURNAROUND.

From an economics point of view, it is quite a conundrum. When I am at the supermarket, I take a look in the baskets to see what the people are buying. Working mothers with young children buy snacks of those small bags of chips, or inexpensive fruit snacks laced with sugar. Not only are these empty calories, but they contribute to obesity. Even if the parents knew about nutrition and healthy eating, the average wage in the Bahamas is not enough to eat well, unless a family is a two-income family with both partners with good jobs.

The minimum wage is not enough to live on, with the high food prices due to having all foodstuffs imported. Most service workers are not making much more than the minimum wage, and it is a poverty wage.

The reason it is an economics problem, is that due to the productivity of the Bahamian worker, they really can't be paid more. Unfortunately the human capital available, doesn't have a high enough intrinsic worth -- being virtually illiterate in language and math skills. And the majority of the cadre of workers fit into this category.

The survival foods for low-income people include the pastas and carbohydrates and that in turn leads to obesity, diabetes, low productivity due to the carb lethargy. It is a vicious circle, and I for one, do not see any answers that would quickly ameliorate the problem. It's an artifact of our economy, our society and our educational system.

Hey Banker, good comment. Sadly the low productivity is a fact, though we cannot ignore the generally excessive profits made in business here, which are never passed on or shared to any degree with the workers.
As an example, where else does a high end home builder make so much money that they can live in homes such as those found in Lyford or OFB, yet that is a common occurrence here. In the more "developed world" , a contractor who builds similar homes pays his employees much higher wages, builds the same or better quality homes for much less per sqft and lives more modestly.
Greed is a big factor in all of this; from the obvious lack of desire to educate the populace, to the "starve your employee mentality" that continues to persist.

I don't think this is a problem that can't be solved, though I'd agree if it ever is solved, it won't be anytime soon.

Change will only come if it comes from the bottom, and that means the people will have to claw their way out of the hole they inhabit.........

You are right about Bahamian workers being underpaid. I myself, worked construction while going to a foreign university (a student visa allowed one to work up to 24 hours per week). I showed up at 6:00 AM at a labour exchange and got a job within half an hour. The contractors paid us the same as the union members to avoid trouble with the unions. It was backbreaking work, but it paid about triple what the minimum wage was. I couldn't believe the money that I was making. I was making significantly more money at 24 hours a week than my relatives here with full time jobs.

The issues here are two-fold. The first is that Haitian labour will always work for cheaper wages, and second the minimum wage is so 1970's. How can you not hire a worker who has a better work ethic, and works for less out of personal desperation? As a result, Bahamians can't compete for unskilled jobs, which is all they can do.

There is a tougher problem. The domestic minimum wage is about $150 a week. The civil service minimum wage is just a bit over $11,000 per year or less than a thousand a month. In this day and age, with the cost of living in the Bahamas, the minimum wage of less than $10,000 a year is untenable. However, as pointed out earlier, in economics, one can valuate the work output of human capital with a multiplier based on economic worth. For example, if I pay someone to create goods or a service for me to sell, generally the value multiplier is twofold. In other words, if I can't sell it for double of what it cost me, I'm not making money -- when you factor in the cost of doing business, fees, accountants, my salary, etc. So if the person is being paid $10 for an hours worth of work, and I can't sell whatever they for $20, then that person is not worth the $10 that I paid. The numbers and value multipliers may be off, but you get the idea.

There are only so many hamburgers that Wendy's can sell, or so many pizzas that you can get at Marcos (didn't mean to plug the Greek family fast food tycoons, but I like their stuff -- although the hamburgers at Jimmy's aint bad). So if it costs more to make the maximum amount of hamburger or pizzas that they can sell in a day, then the economic value of the employees is not worth what they are paying them.

And because our economy is so monolithic and screwed up, I can get away with paying people their economic worth, which is low, and charge a heck of a lot more that the product is worth. This is true of the luxury homes. If you built the same home on Yamacraw Road as you did in Old Fort Bay or Lyford Cay, the cost to the buyer would be triple, the profits are triple, and yet the workers are paid the same.

If we did have a robust economy, and the demand for workers outstripped the supply, then there could be decent wages. But with a systemic structural unemployment rate of 13-15%, and a stalled GDP growth, that will never happen. The economy is more likely to implode.

What makes it even more problematic, is the percentage of the population who find fat pigs sexy. We should not forget either what great examples some members of parliament are on weight control!