BMI is not a good health indicator
Really? Say it ain’t so! But every doctor on this planet has been telling people for years that they are “overweight” or even “obese” according to their BMI and that they need to exercise, eat a low fat diet, and get healthier in order to live longer. It’s FINALLY starting to come out and become more and more known that the BMI is not the health indicator doctors AND insurance companies have been using it as. As this article says, it was NEVER intended to be used as a measurement of body fat or health, because it fails in both those regards.
Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet devised the equation in 1832 in his quest to define the “normal man” in terms of everything from his average arm strength to the age at which he marries. This project had nothing to do with obesity-related diseases, nor even with obesity itself. Rather, Quetelet used the equation to describe the standard proportions of the human build—the ratio of weight to height in the average adult.
Further more, the BMI is insanely inaccurate for measuring actual body fat due to gender, body type and composition, and abdominal fat. One’s Body Fat % is a much more accurate picture of just how much fat that person’s body is carrying. This fat includes much needed organ fat as well as subcutaneous fat (fat under the skin). Men typically carry less body fat (12 – 20%) by nature due to the higher levels of the hormone testosterone which helps build muscle quickly…….while women normally carry anywhere between 16 – 25%. No human should get too low in body fat (typically 5% for guys and 10% for women) for various health reasons (cessation of menstruation in woman, loss of needed organ fat that pads and protects organs, various organ function, etc). There are many other more accurate methods out there for measuring body fat such as scales, fat calipers, etc.
So why then are heath providers, doctors, insurance companies, etc still so reliant on an inaccurate measurement. Because it’s easy. Things will only change when we as humans and consumers demand them to change to a more accurate measurement method and stop labeling many healthy people (including bodybuilders for goodness sakes) as “overweight” or even “obese”.
