{"id":547,"date":"2020-02-02T22:12:47","date_gmt":"2020-02-03T03:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/?p=547"},"modified":"2023-09-16T18:33:54","modified_gmt":"2023-09-16T22:33:54","slug":"body-mass-index","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/02\/body-mass-index\/","title":{"rendered":"Body Mass Index"},"content":{"rendered":"

After losing 40 pounds over several years my BMI is now the same as it was when I was in the Army \u2026 50 years ago.\u00a0 BMI is a formula* used to classify people as underweight, normal, overweight, or obese.\u00a0 These classes are used as predictors of health, originally intended as guidance for physicians.\u00a0 When I was in the Army I was in the best shape of my life.\u00a0 Since I now have the same BMI I should be perfectly healthy and (after 50 years of a sedentary career) should fit into the same clothes.\u00a0 Of course I do not.\u00a0 My waist size is still 3 or 4 inches larger and I no longer have the same muscle mass.\u00a0 While reasonably accurate for mass sedentary populations, BMI treats fat just like muscle and is biased against taller, younger, and athletic people.\u00a0 Many champion athletes and action movie stars<\/a> rate as overweight or even obese under the BMI.<\/p>\n

* \u00a0 BMI \u00a0=\u00a0 kg \/ m\u00b2 \u00a0 <\/sup>=\u00a0 10,000 x kg \/ cm\u00b2\u00a0 = 703 x lb \/ in\u00b2\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Note that this formula requires access to a weight scale, more math than some people are comfortable with, and needs a correction factor depending upon the units used. \u00a0Proposed new formulas suggest a 1.3 multiplier and raising height to the 2.5 power, not the kind of thing everyone understands.\u00a0 Other tweaks include things like multiplying your BMI by your serum albumin level in grams per liter.<\/p>\n

BMI is a crock. \u00a0 It is also an inferior predictor of health outcomes.\u00a0 This is not news.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The main social problem is that it has evolved from guidance for physicians into a absolute mandate for the bureaucrats who run our children\u2019s lives and is used to bully athletic school children who have more muscle and less fat than their compatriots.<\/p>\n

A much better metric is the waist-height ratio<\/a>.\u00a0 Measure your waist and divide by your height.\u00a0 Simple.\u00a0 All you need is a tape measure. \u00a0It doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s in inches, centimeters, or old Russian vershoks. \u00a0WHtR does a far superior job of accounting for muscle versus fat.\u00a0 A 2010 study that followed 11,000 subjects for up to eight years concluded that WHtR is a much better measure of the risk of heart attack, stroke or death than the more widely used body mass index.<\/p>\n

The US Army has recently switched to WHtR after determining that it is a better metric for body condition.\u00a0 Even the creators of the BMI maintain that it was only intended for population comparisons, not individual comparisons which it is not suited for.\u00a0 The question arises, why did they come up with BMI when they knew its shortcomings.\u00a0 Ah.\u00a0 They were studying available population records to include health, longevity, and demographic data.\u00a0 Consider your driver’s license data.\u00a0 It contains height, weight, and age but NOT your waist size.\u00a0 Waist size is simply not available in public data bases so they used what was available, height and weight, reasonable for populations but not individuals.<\/p>\n

In any case, unlike BMI, waist-height ratio sorts people into a reasonable order:<\/p>\n

0.3359\u00a0\u00a0 Marilyn Monroe<\/p>\n

0.4240\u00a0\u00a0 Female college swimmer<\/p>\n

0.4280\u00a0\u00a0 Male college swimmer<\/p>\n

0.4580\u00a0\u00a0 Bodybuilder<\/p>\n

0.4920\u00a0\u00a0 Female at increased risk<\/p>\n

0.5000\u00a0\u00a0 General healthy cutoff<\/p>\n

0.5100 \u00a0\u00a0Risk equivalent to BMI of 25<\/p>\n

0.5360\u00a0\u00a0 Males at increased risk<\/p>\n

0.5700\u00a0\u00a0 Risk equivalent to BMI of 30<\/p>\n

0.5770\u00a0\u00a0 Obese<\/p>\n

0.5820\u00a0\u00a0 Substantial risk increase<\/p>\n

As for me, my WHtR tells me I have a ways to go yet.<\/p>\n

———————————————————-<\/p>\n

The spambots are getting out of hand :\u00a0 Please leave comments using the post in my comments category.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After losing 40 pounds over several years my BMI is now the same as it was when I was in the Army \u2026 50 years ago.\u00a0 BMI is a formula* used to classify people as underweight, normal, overweight, or obese.\u00a0 These classes are used as predictors of health, originally intended as guidance for physicians.\u00a0 When … Continue reading “Body Mass Index”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-bmi","tag-health","tag-whtr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":883,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions\/883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irrelevant-tech.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}