Thus, athletes and fit, health-conscious movie stars who work out a lot tend to find themselves classified as overweight or even obese. But bone is denser than muscle and twice as dense as fat, so a person with strong bones, good muscle tone and low fat will have a high BMI. It makes no allowance for the relative proportions of bone, muscle and fat in the body. Moreover, it ignores waist size, which is a clear indicator of obesity level. If you can't fix the data, rig the formula!). There is no physiological reason to square a person's height (Quetelet had to square the height to get a formula that matched the overall data. In other words, it is a 200-year-old hack. He produced the formula to give a quick and easy way to measure the degree of obesity of the general population to assist the government in allocating resources. The BMI was introduced in the early 19th century by a Belgian named Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual. The study found that nearly two-thirds of states now have adult obesity rates above 25 percent.īut you may want to take those findings - and your next meal - with a grain of salt, because they're based on a calculation called the body mass index, or BMI.Īs the Weekend Edition math guy, I spoke to Scott Simon and told him the body mass index fails on 10 grounds:ġ. Americans keep putting on the pounds - at least according to a report released this week from the Trust for America's Health.
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