Individuals get online and calculate their own BMI and start self-diagnosing. Private health insurance providers use this magical formula to determine insurance premiums, and in some cases to deny insurance coverage. Of course the drawbacks to using a derived formula meant to define a population to define an individual are numerous. They admit on their website that the reason they use BMI to measure “overweight and obesity” is because it is an inexpensive (in fact, virtually free) tool that is easy to use for both medical clinicians and the general public. The CDC website states on their website that “the correlation between the BMI number and body fatness is fairly strong” and follows that statement with a caveat that the “BMI should not be used as a diagnostic tool”.
This is done on an INDIVIDUAL basis… based solely on height and weight… no regard for age, gender, athleticism, ethnicity, lean muscle, frame, bone density… I could go on. The CDC adopted the NIH definitions and encourages medical professionals to advise their adult patients with a BMI over 25 and to warn them about obesity-related diseases. The categories defined by the WHO and NIH are broken down as follows: definitions into line with World Health Organization guidelines, lowering the normal/overweight cut-off to BMI 25.
National Institute for Health brought U.S. Since the early 80’s, the World Health Organization has used the BMI as the standard for recording obesity statistics.
Keys explicitly stated that the BMI was appropriate to a population as a whole, but warned that it was inappropriate for individual diagnosis. Keys was the one to rename the formula to body mass index. He determined that the best predictor of body-fat percentages was Quetelet’s weight divided by height-squared formula. Quetelet’s formula was not associated with obesity until 1972 when a researcher named Ancel Keys published a study that examined height-weight formulas in relation to body fat percentages. This is perfectly acceptable as long as your goal is to draw conclusions about a population as a whole. He used his statistical data to build a formula that was empirically representative of the “average”. After collecting data from several hundred men, Quetelet derived his formula to define the build of the normal man using the proportion of height to weight. His formula had nothing to do with obesity. Quetelet’s goal was to define the “normal man” - everything from physical attributes to life events.
He was a founder of both statistics and sociology, and perhaps the first to use statistical analysis to draw conclusions about a population. In spite of my beef with the BMI in its modern incarnation, Quetelet was no ordinary comb-your-hair-with-nothing-finer-than-your-hands mathematician. This formula was one that was derived by Belgian mathematician, Adolph Quetelet in 1832. The BMI was originally called the Quetelet formula. After a few minutes of standing on a scale looking thing and holding onto the magic handles, I was presented with a piece of paper that was written entirely in German, but was surprisingly still decipherable.Īs I was reviewing the results of my test with my business partner, she came across my BMI number, prompting the comment “huh… I wouldn’t have expected it to be that high.” And that comment reminded me that I wanted to write a Did ya’ know rant article about the numerology of the BMI.īMI = Body Mass Index = (Weight in kilograms) / (height in meters)2 It had been a year or so since I did one last (albeit by a different technique), and I was curious to see what progress or regress I had made, so I stopped and asked the mainly German speaking young man there to run his test on me. I came across one that would do a body fat test for me. At an international trade show I attended last year, I took a break to go walk around and check out the other booths.
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