Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Study finds standard "obesity" test badly flawed

Body Mass Index, invented by Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet between 1830 and 1850, is a measure of body fat calculated from height and weight.
A figure of less than 18.5 is considered underweight, while from 18.5 to 24.9 is normal, 25 to 29.9 is overweight and anything over 30 is categorized as obese.
Intended as a broad indicator of general health, it has become a standard diagnostic tool of heart disease risk.
Maria Grazia Franzosi from the Instituto Mario Negri in Milan, writing in the same issue of the Lancet, noted that a 52-country study comparing four different tests -- BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, waist measure and hip measure -- found that waist-to-hip was the best predictor of heart attack risk.
"BMI can definitely be left aside as a clinical and epidemiological measure of cardiovascular risk," she said.


Its crap like this that makes trying to figure out how to be healthy so annoying. I understand BMI being easy for anyone to calculate, but given that it isn't predictive of what it is supposed to predict, why not add a disclaimer. Granted, maybe if I read all the way through eDiets or any of the other ones I would find a disclaimer, but I would prefer this understanding to be much more front and center.

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