Similar caveats exist for women, who carry weight differently throughout their lifetimes, and older people. For example, Polynesians are generally healthier at a higher weight range, while for people of Asian descent, a lower BMI is seen as optimal. In the centuries since, research has revealed that a healthy weight is different for certain ethnicities. When the test was devised in the 1800s it only took into account white European bodies. While few of us are professional bodybuilders or weight lifters, a bigger flaw is the natural differences in body types between people of various ethnicities, genders and ages. That's because the test doesn't account for the difference between muscle mass, bone density and body fat. Using the BMI, most elite athletes would be classified as overweight. The most common example given against the BMI's effectiveness is athletes. It only gives you a very rough measure of what someone's health could be like based on this number." "But at an individual level, it really falls down. "If you're looking at the whole population, BMI is wonderful," Dr Crowe says. of Bantu men in general".) Where the BMI falls short They included American students and professionals, Italian railway workers, men from east and west Finland, Japanese farmers and fishermen, and Bantu men from South Africa (which the study itself says "could not be suggested to be a representative sample. It only measured 7,426 "healthy" men from 12 sample groups. It wasn't until the 1970s when American physiologist and dietician Ancel Keys and a group of his colleagues promoted Quetelet's Index as the best available way to quickly screen for obesity that it became what we know today as the BMI.īut like Quetelet, the Keys study didn't account for all body types. For one, all the participants were western European men. The experiment also had nothing to do with measuring individual health. His thinking went that you could take thousands of measurements, compare them, and find the ideal weight. Through calculating these samples he found that weight typically increases in relation to the square height of a person.īut there were big limitations to Quetelet's experiment. In the 1830s, Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet set out not to devise a test to quickly diagnose obesity (which was still years away from being widely perceived as a problem), but to find the " l'homme moyen" or the "average man". The first thing to know about the BMI is that it was created by a Belgian mathematician - not a doctor or health practitioner. So how did this formula come to define so much of what we think we know about weight and health, and why is it still in use? The BMI's really old, non-medical and racist origins But almost 200 years later, the BMI is ubiquitous - in bedrooms as people plug their dimensions into online calculators, in determining eligibility for the COVID-19 vaccine, at the doctor's office, or in the World Health Organization's definition of obesity. "It was more of an academic exercise back in the 1830s," dietician Tim Crowe says. And the BMI's easy-to-understand formula, while a handy tool for those in charge of population-wide research, is not always up to the task. It's a simple formula: weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared and voila, you have your body mass index - a two-digit figure that slots you into a handful of equally clear-cut boxes.Ī BMI, as it's more commonly known, of below 18.5 supposedly means you're underweight, between 18.5 and 24.9 is normal, and above 30.0 is obese.īut this simplicity, many experts now say, hides the fact that determining what weight is healthy for you is far from this simple.
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