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FAT IS A DIVING ISSUE
STEVE WEINMAN, EDITOR
WE ALL CARRY FAT. We need it to keep warm and to keep us going between meals. But it's generally acknowledged that an overabundance of body fat puts us at a disadvantage in most sports, so how far does that include the all-inclusive sport of diving?
This month's cover is provocative. We hope no one takes it personally, but this is an issue we felt deserved to be raised. At DIVER we receive reports of diving incidents regularly, and they can make depressing reading. But last year we started noticing something that had perhaps been submerged in statistics before.
The received wisdom was that when dives went badly wrong, it tended to happen to divers over-reaching themselves - perhaps to the newly qualified, inadequately prepared for an environment tougher than the one in which they had trained, or technical divers "pushing the envelope".
But what we were seeing were unexplained deaths among experienced divers using familiar equipment and doing what to them would not be particularly challenging dives. What a number of victims had in common was that they were middle-aged men.
Then we published news of an Australian report into five unrelated diving deaths. This identified four of its five subjects as clinically obese, with related heart, lung and digestive problems. Three of the divers had been experienced but out of practice.
It's not difficult to imagine the scenario - a long-time diver who takes both his skills and his health for granted but is growing less fit year by year, as time and possibly beer, chips and fags take their toll. Then one day, perhaps working hard in cold currents, it all becomes too much for his system.
Let's not kid ourselves, for all the lugging-about of tanks and the bracing fresh air, diving is not a sport that makes you fit.
Everyone's lifestyle is their own choice and, as someone who until quite recently thought a cross-trainer was an overworked OWSI, my own stomach could well have auditioned for this month's cover. But you don't have to be middle-aged, or a man for that matter, to find yourself in the danger zone.
According to the authorities, we're in the midst of an obesity crisis. Much blame is placed on television for breeding a couch-potato generation, so it's ironic that it has taken mockney TV chef Jamie Oliver to lead the way in highlighting the problem.
Amanda Ursell is not only a diver but TV's best-known nutritionist. She too has been tackling the problem, recently by advocating the GI diet, a comparatively painless way to control weight. So we asked her to look into diving and obesity - read her report in this issue.
Intriguingly, Amanda tells me that she consulted three diving doctors while writing the article (not including our own Dr Ian Sibley-Calder, who was away), but none of them wished to be quoted. Why? Is this issue really that controversial?
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