Professor of Nutrition weighs in on Wii Fit - what a bunch of baloney!

A portion of a GameSpy interview with Dr. Judith S. Stern, professor of Nutrition and Internal Medicine at the University of California…

GameSpy: Nintendo’s Wii Fit is launching tomorrow in the United States. The idea is that with Wii Fit, people who would normally play games on their couch will get up, get active, and use the Balance Board to improve their personal fitness. What do you think of the premise behind Wii Fit, where using the game will help reduce your BMI?

Dr. Judith Stern: My understanding is that Nintendo is saying that if you track BMI, and by using this program, that you’ll improve your BMI, or lower your BMI. I say baloney to that. In fact, I’m sure you’ll see very little change in BMI. It’s not just BMI you want to look at, but how fat you are.

When you are physically fit, you tend to replace fat with muscle, and your BMI probably won’t change. It will change when you do extreme things, like if you exercise for two or three hours a day, I’m pretty sure your BMI will change. If you’ve just lost weight, you can maintain your BMI more readily with exercise, but I don’t see anything that shows me that BMI will change, and I really think it’s false and misleading.

Dr. Stern has a lot of nit-picking when it comes to Wii Fit, and she also throws in her two cents on Wii Fit calling that young girl ‘obese’. Click here for the full interview.