Size is the prize in the NFL, but a study suggests more than half the league's players would be considered obese by certain medical definitions.
The study already has come under scrutiny, however, for its method of application.
University of North Carolina endocrinologist Joyce Harp and student Lindsay Hecht determined the obesity of 2,168 NFL players in the 2003-04 season by using the body-mass index (BMI), a height-to-weight ratio that doesn't measure muscle over fat.
Dr. Barbara Hansen, an expert in obesity and a faculty member in the department of physiology at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, allowed that the body-mass index was not a good measure for the study, but acknowledged the prevalence of obesity at certain positions in the NFL.
"No question some NFL players are very muscular, work out a lot, have huge muscle masses, and to that degree, the BMI is inaccurate," Hansen said yesterday.
"However, it is also true there are quite a number of players who are fat. They have big potbellies, they have fat on their shoulders, they have fat coating their arms and they are in fact obese."
Hansen said the only way to measure the percentage of fat on NFL players was to use a piece of equipment that separates fat and lean mass, called the dual energy x-ray absorptiometry.
A football fan, Hansen effectively defined the NFL's obesity.
"Obesity has a very high genetic propensity in the U.S., and when [teams] are selecting their players, especially for the front line, they are selecting for obesity. What they want to do is select for obesity, but [for players to] be pretty agile."
Virtually all players in the study qualified as overweight for height and weight. With a BMI of at least 30, 56 percent of those players were determined to be obese. But a 6-foot-2 man who weighs 235 pounds has a BMI of just over 30, which is considered obese by medical standards.
"The whole concept of BMI as a measure for obesity comes from statistical data across the huge population," said Dr. Ormond A. MacDougald, a University of Michigan professor of physiology. "Those guys aren't your average measure of society."
Harp said it was uncertain to determine how many players were fat without measuring body composition, but she also said it's unlikely the high BMIs were "due to a healthy increase in muscle mass alone."
