“Obesity, like all disease, is complex and cannot be captured with a single measurement,” she said, pointing out that there are different severity levels. Shannon Aymes, an assistant professor of medicine focused on weight management at the UNC School of Medicine, said she uses BMI along with other criteria like the Edmonton Obesity Staging System, combined with up to an hour-long patient visit, to come up with a plan for each patient. “It’s like, ‘Oh, really? That was 20 years ago.’ ”ĭr. Ethan Weiss, a preventive cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco and entrepreneur in residence at venture capital firm Third Rock. “This is almost like somebody announced that we’ve just figured out that people are going to be using cell phones,” said Dr. To some clinicians, the need to focus on more than BMI for individuals is old news. And while it’s “significantly correlated with the amount of fat mass in the general population,” the association said, it “loses predictability when applied on the individual level.” “BMI is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations,” the AMA wrote. “It is easy to calculate and essentially costs nothing,” Ard wrote in an email, “so this makes it very hard to replace.”īut a movement to shift away from BMI as a measure of individual health risk alone is gaining steam: Last week, the American Medical Association adopted a new policy on the index, noting “significant limitations associated with widespread use of BMI in clinical settings” and citing its “historical harm” and “use for racist exclusion.” Influencer who died after trying to lose 100kg at weight loss boot camps spotlighted by Chinese state media How the state-owned media outlet CNR News covered the death of influencer Cuihua on its Weibo account. “It is part of the consideration for life insurance your employer may use BMI to offer certain wellness programs to you.”īMI is used to determine eligibility for weight loss medications, and it can affect access to joint-replacement surgery and fertility treatment. Jamy Ard, a professor of epidemiology and prevention at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. ![]() “It is noted in every medical record,” said Dr. Now it’s everywhere, most specifically as a screening tool for obesity: A BMI of less than 18.5 is “underweight,” “healthy weight” is up to 24.9, “overweight” is 25 to 29.9, and “obesity” is a BMI of 30 and above.Īnd for a metric designed to be applied broadly across the general population, it’s taken on outsized significance for individuals, even sometimes called a “scarlet letter.” Ancel Keys proposed it as an estimate of body fat, that it got its more recognizable name: the body mass index, or BMI. ![]() It wasn’t until 1972, when physiologist Dr. ![]() Roughly 200 years ago, a Belgian mathematician and statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, seeking to characterize “normal man,” observed that adults’ body weight in kilograms is roughly proportional to the square of their height in meters – a measurement that came to be referred to as the Quetelet index.
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