BMI does not measure body fat distribution People with lots of muscle mass are often classed as overweight according to BMI. At the extreme, BMI has classified athletes in peak fitness condition, such as sprinter Usain Bolt, as almost overweight, and American footballer Tom Brady as obese. While body weight can be a proxy for body fat, there’s an important reason it doesn’t always tell an accurate story: muscle is much denser than fat.īecause BMI calculators can’t differentiate fat from muscle, people can be easily misclassified. BMI misses a more important measure – body fat percentageīMI is based on body weight, but a person’s disease risk is linked to body fat, not weight. While BMI is an accessible and affordable way to screen a person’s health, it shouldn’t be relied on as a single measure of health.ġ. The numbers don't have it: why measuring won't lead to better health overweight – a BMI between 25.0 and 29.9.Your result classifies you into one of four categories describing your body weight in a single word: To get your index, divide your weight by the square of your height in metres. The BMI formula is simple, and easy to calculate thanks to the many free BMI calculators available online. How is BMI measured, and what do the scores mean? ![]() Its use soon became widespread, and today, BMI is found everywhere, from the doctor’s surgery to the gym. Quetelet’s calculation was subsequently renamed BMI and adopted as a primary indicator of health, thanks to subsequent studies confirming increased risks of heart disease, liver disease, arthritis, some cancers, diabetes and sleep apnoea with increased BMI.Įxplainer: overweight, obese, BMI – what does it all mean? Shutterstockįast-forward 100 years to the United States, where life insurance companies had started comparing people’s weight to an average population weight for similar individuals to calculate insurance premiums based on a predicted risk of dying.Īnnoyed by this somewhat unscientific approach, US physiologist Ancel Keys completed research with 7,000 healthy men using Quetelet’s measure, finding this method was a more accurate and simpler predictor of health that was also inexpensive. BMI started as a way to describe the average white man in the 1800s.
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