Economic Worries, Redistricting Battles, Reconsidering BMI

Speaker 1 This week I have a voice. You know, last week I didn't have a voice.

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Speaker 3 It was just showing the strain of delivering the news to America. Exactly.

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Speaker 1 The Bureau of Labor Statistics says employers added fewer jobs than expected last month. And after looking closer at May and June, there's more bad news.

Speaker 3 So President Trump wants that agency's head on the chopping block.

Speaker 1 Also is BMI body mass index the best way to know if you're overweight. We have new information.

Speaker 3 And more state houses weaponize redistricting. We take a look.

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Speaker 3 This week featured some not-so-good news for the U.S. on the economic front.

Speaker 1 Official data showed fewer jobs, higher prices, and slower economic growth as President Trump's tariff strategy takes effect.

Speaker 1 Even the stock market, which had been discounting worries about the president's policies, took a tumble, with the SP 500 showing its worst week since Trump's April announcement of sweeping tariffs.

Speaker 3 President Trump says the job numbers are, quote, rigged and accuses the Bureau of Labor Statistics of bias. NPR Chief Economics Correspondent Scott Horsley joins us.
Scott, thanks for being with us.

Speaker 3 Good morning. Let's begin with that jobs report yesterday.
Kind of a gut punch. What does it say?

Speaker 2 It says the labor market is not as strong as many people thought.

Speaker 2 Employers added a lot fewer jobs than expected in July, and job gains for May and June, which had looked pretty healthy, were all but erased when the regular monthly revisions came in.

Speaker 2 Now, it is important to note that the U.S. workforce is not growing as fast as it was a few years ago.

Speaker 2 Immigration's pretty much dried up, and with a lot of baby boomers retiring, we don't need to add as many jobs as we once did to keep pace with the population.

Speaker 2 But even with that low bar, hiring fell short in these last three months, so the unemployment rate inched up to 4.2 percent.

Speaker 3 Scott, why would job growth be so weak?

Speaker 2 Well, it's matching a slowdown in the wider economy. We got new GDP numbers this week, which showed the economy is still growing, but only about half as fast as it did in the two previous years.

Speaker 2 If you strip out some of the noise around imports and government spending, private sector demand has downshifted.

Speaker 2 And economist Jed Kolko, who's with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says that means employers just don't need as many workers.

Speaker 6 It looks like overall demand in the economy is weakening. And that's consistent with a slowdown in payrolls that we now see more clearly is happening.

Speaker 2 Kolko also suggests that industries that rely on a lot of immigrant labor, like construction and restaurants and home health care, may be having trouble finding the workers they would like to hire.

Speaker 2 The share of immigrants who are in the workforce has dropped over the last year, and it seems likely that increased immigration enforcement has driven some people underground.

Speaker 3 President Trump also announced plans this week for increased tariffs on imports from many countries. What kind of effect does that have on the economy?

Speaker 2 Tariffs are achieving one of the president's goals, which is raising a lot of money for the government.

Speaker 2 Tariffs are bringing in close to $30 billion a month right now, and that could go higher if these increased taxes take effect.

Speaker 2 But so far, tariffs don't seem to be meeting another of the president's goals, which is boosting domestic manufacturing. Factory orders are in a slump.

Speaker 2 Factories cut jobs last month for the third month in a row. Tom Derry heads the Institute for Supply Management, which conducts a monthly survey of factory managers.

Speaker 2 He says the only silver lining of this new round of tariffs is that business owners may finally get some degree of certainty.

Speaker 6 Most of us in the business world believe a zero tariff is preferred, but that's not what we're living with. If it becomes more stable, we can react and deal with it.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Trump's tariffs are pushing up prices, especially on things like toys and appliances.

Speaker 2 The Commerce Department said this week consumer prices were up 2.6 percent in June from a year ago, which was a bigger increase than the previous month.

Speaker 2 So inflation is moving in the wrong direction, and that makes it harder for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, even if that might help to prop up the sagging job market.

Speaker 3 And of course, the president called for the head numbers cruncher the government to be fired. What does that do to the markets?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the president suggested with zero evidence that the jobs number had been rigged to make him look bad. It's not the first time Trump has attacked the government's numbers.

Speaker 2 He loves to tout them when they're favorable, and when they're not, he tries to deflect the blame.

Speaker 2 Economists across the political spectrum sounded the alarm about this move to fire the top statistician at the Labor Department, saying it's the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a banana republic, not the United States of America.

Speaker 3 Scott Horsley, thanks so much.

Speaker 2 You're welcome.

Speaker 1 President Trump is urging Austin lawmakers to redraw Texas congressional maps to guarantee Republicans five more seats in Congress.

Speaker 3 And there are more Republican-led states thinking along the same lines.

Speaker 3 So now some Democratic governors of California, Illinois, and New York say they might respond by redistricting more wins for Democrats.

Speaker 1 We have two reporters in states now swept up in this fight, KQED's Guy Marzerati. Guy, welcome.

Speaker 7 Great to be with you.

Speaker 3 And Sarah Donaldson of the Ohio State House News Bureau, thank you for being with us.

Speaker 8 Hey, good to be here.

Speaker 3 And Guy, let me ask you first. In California, how's Governor Newsom waiting on this potential battle between California and Texas?

Speaker 7 He certainly seems to want to go toe-to-toe with Texas on this.

Speaker 7 Newsom has floated a plan to redraw California's house maps, really with the purpose of helping Democrats because of what he's described as this break-the-glass moment.

Speaker 9 Everything is at stake if we're not successful next year in taking back the House of Representatives.

Speaker 7 And political analysts I've talked to in California say Democrats could pick up about five seats with the redraw. But there are two caveats here, Scott, I think I should mention.

Speaker 7 One is that Newsom has said he'll halt his plan if Texas does not move ahead with their own redistricting.

Speaker 7 And the second is that this whole line drawing process is going to be tougher and perhaps more complicated in California than it would be in Texas.

Speaker 3 What makes it more complicated in California?

Speaker 7 Really, just the fact that our political lines in California are drawn by this independent commission. And that commission was created by the voters back in 2010.

Speaker 7 So unlike in Texas, Newsom will have to go back to the voters to get permission to move ahead with this kind of gerrymander.

Speaker 7 And I talked to a former member of California's Redistricting Commission about this. Her name's Sarah Sadwani.
She's a politics professor at Pomona College.

Speaker 7 And she really defended the independent commission's record, even as I think she understands where Newsom is coming from with this.

Speaker 10 We haven't had a single lawsuit brought against our maps. We have some of the most competitive districts in the nation.
On balance, those should be good things.

Speaker 10 But when not all states are playing by the same set of rules, California is essentially bringing a rubber band to a gunfight.

Speaker 7 And I'll add that the timeline for all this is pretty tight.

Speaker 7 If there was a special election in the fall for these new maps and they were approved, you'd then have a really quick turnaround right into the 2026 campaign.

Speaker 3 Sarah, you, of course, live in a state that voted heavily for President Trump in 2024. How does it figure into this growing redistricting fight?

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's kind of a unique scenario here.

Speaker 8 Ohio always had to redistrict mid-decade because of this 2018 law that says if Republican and Democratic state lawmakers couldn't come to consensus on the maps, they'd have to go back to the drawing board.

Speaker 8 And in 2021, they couldn't. So heading into this fall, there was a chance that map making could have just been status quo, but it's hard to say whether that's changed under this current climate.

Speaker 8 I am hearing a lot about national pressure to draw districts that are more friendly to Republicans.

Speaker 3 We know that President Trump has said in Texas his goal would be five more Republican seats. What would the numbers look like in Ohio?

Speaker 8 Right now, Ohio has 10 Republicans and five Democrats. But Democrats won two of those five races pretty narrowly in 2024.

Speaker 8 So Representative Marcy Kaptur, she's the longest serving woman in Congress and won by just a percentage point.

Speaker 8 But there's talk about desire for a 13-2 breakdown that would be a gain of three Republican seats. Analysts on the ground say that could be a heavy lift, though.

Speaker 8 I talked with Jen Miller with the League of Women Voters of Ohio. She told me she's worried the focus is on the 2026 midterms, not what most benefits voters.

Speaker 11 It should go the other way around. We should be looking at what communities constitute a district.

Speaker 8 I should note Miller and others have been part of past efforts in Ohio to create an independent redistricting commission like California's. Ohio voters handily rejected that on the ballot in 2024.

Speaker 3 You're both political reporters. So please tell us what strikes you in this moment about the political position of your state, Sarah?

Speaker 8 Yeah, you know, we're talking about these districts that are going to be drawn with, while it's recent data, it's historical data technically. And that's to predict future voter demographics.

Speaker 8 But demographics shift too. So Ohio is under a 10 Republican, five Democratic map right now, but some of that is because there were close races.

Speaker 7 And I'll just add, you know, I think this comes at a time when Democrats really like across the country are increasingly asking their elected leaders to be more confrontational, to fight, even at the expense of compromise, even at the expense of norms.

Speaker 7 And I think this redistricting fight in California, you know, the country's largest Democratic state, it's a great test case.

Speaker 7 You know, will voters here scrap a redistricting commission that they see as fair just to give Democrats a partisan edge?

Speaker 3 Guy Mars Arati with KQED, San Francisco. Sarah Donaldson with the Ohio State House News Bureau in Columbus.
Thank you both very much.

Speaker 7 Thanks so much. Thank you.

Speaker 3 You, me, children, we've all heard of BMI, body mass index, your height combined with your weight, distilled into the go-to way to determine if a person is overweight.

Speaker 1 But for years, doctors have been wrestling with how much to rely on BMI. And now there's new research to add more color to the picture.
NPR health correspondent Will Stone joins us now. Hi, Will.

Speaker 5 Hey, good to be here.

Speaker 1 So first, what's behind the debate over BMI?

Speaker 12 The problem here is really that BMI lacks nuance. It's basically an indirect measure of whether you have excess body fat.
And there are certain agreed upon cutoffs. A BMI of 25 to 29 is overweight.

Speaker 12 And obesity is defined as more than 30. And just for context here, 70 plus percent of the US population falls into one of those two categories.
But BMI can actually misinform people.

Speaker 12 For example, you may be classified as overweight, but that could be due to muscle mass. This is especially true for athletes, people who lift weights.

Speaker 12 And on the other hand, BMI also can't distinguish if someone is in a normal range, meaning under 25, but does have excess body fat, especially high amounts around the belly.

Speaker 12 This visceral fat is particularly bad for health.

Speaker 12 So ultimately, all of this matters because doctors care about your risk of health problems like heart disease or diabetes, and critics point to evidence showing BMI isn't necessarily reliable.

Speaker 1 And is that what this new research is showing?

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's part of it. This latest study is from a team at the University of Florida, and it was published in the Annals of Family Medicine.

Speaker 12 They looked at more than 4,000 adults between the ages of 20 and 49 and their risk of dying over the next 15 years. And they compared BMI with body fat percentage.

Speaker 12 Arch Manus is one of the study's authors.

Speaker 13 And what we find is that BMI doesn't predict. We find that this direct measure of body fat and lean muscle mass does predict.
It predicts quite well.

Speaker 12 So here they measured body fat with bioelectrical impedance analysis, BIA, and that uses an electrical current to estimate body composition.

Speaker 12 And you can buy scales that do this for a few hundred dollars. The accuracy does vary between machines, but Maynes argues it's still better than BMI.

Speaker 12 And he points to their results showing people in the higher body fat group had a 78% increased risk of dying.

Speaker 13 And even for cardiovascular or heart disease, what we find is that people who are above our standard thresholds on this have a 262% increased risk of dying in the next 15 years.

Speaker 13 which I thought was pretty dramatic.

Speaker 1 And what were those standard thresholds for body fat?

Speaker 12 Okay, for men, it was anyone over 27% body fat, and for women, it was 44%.

Speaker 12 And those percentages are based on evidence, a review of studies.

Speaker 12 But the authors acknowledge there is no consensus about what the ranges should look like if body fat percentages do replace BMI one day. And that would likely vary based on age and other factors.

Speaker 1 Do others in the medical community think replacing BMI as a measure is a good idea?

Speaker 12 Well, the fact is, BMI is baked into our healthcare system. It's simple, it's inexpensive, but the issues with it are well recognized.

Speaker 12 The American Medical Association even updated its policy a few years ago to say doctors should not only rely on BMI when evaluating patients. I reached out to Dr.
Michael Blaha about this.

Speaker 12 He's a cardiologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

Speaker 14 I think BMI still has utility in large populations where you need a quick measurement.

Speaker 14 It gives you a real good starting point about how overweight or obese someone might be, how much body fat they might have. And it is true that if you have a very high BMI,

Speaker 14 you're going to have increased body fat. We know that.
But in the clinical setting, we need something better.

Speaker 12 Now, you know, this is just one study and there are limits. All cause mortality can be a blunt way to measure health risk.

Speaker 12 Also, Blaha thinks a waist circumference, not just body fat, is another good approach.

Speaker 12 But big picture, with so many people dealing with weight-related chronic diseases, many doctors do agree it's critical to fine-tune how they measure this so they can accurately advise patients about their risk.

Speaker 1 NPR Health Correspondent Will Stone, thank you so much, Will.

Speaker 12 Thank you.

Speaker 3 And that's it first for August 2nd, 2025. I'm Scott Simon.
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