spiked Online
London, UK
Wednesday 28 May 2008


Body Mass Index: a big fat lie

[B]spiked and Wellcome Collection have launched a new website to debate the best and worst ideas, phenomena, developments and practices in the history of medicine, in the run-up to two big live debates in London on 26 June and 17 July. Here, Patrick Basham and John Luik nominate Body Mass Index as the worst idea.

There are four central problems with Body Mass Index (BMI), a method of comparing someone’s weight and height first proposed by the Belgian researcher Adolphe Quetelet in the nineteenth century and which has found increasing currency as a measure of the ‘obesity epidemic’ in recent years.

First, it fails to provide an accurate measure of overweight and obesity. Second, it is arbitrary in its classifications of normal, overweight and obese. Third, its classifications of overweight and obese generally do not correspond to increased risk for premature death or serious illness.

And fourth, its unscientific character has allowed it to be transformed into the major tool for misrepresenting the risks of overweight and obesity and justifying a ‘war on fat’.

The BMI provides an inaccurate measure of overweight and obesity because it cannot distinguish between fat, muscle, organ and water. BMI is simply the ratio of body weight (in kilogrammes) divided by the height in metres squared (kg/m2). As such, it tells us nothing about what the weight is made up of. Bodybuilders, for instance, may have high BMIs despite having little fat. The BMI, being simply a measure of weight and height, cannot account for body frame, for instance the differences between men and shorter women, nor is it an accurate measure of children’s weight status. Slight Sri Lankan children in Australia have more body fat than white Australian children with the same BMI.

But the BMI is also arbitrary in that it simply reflects someone’s view as to where to draw the line between normal, overweight and obese. There is no scientific reason why someone with a BMI over 25 should be labelled overweight or someone with a BMI over 30 as obese. Professor Tim Cole of the UK Institute of Child Health, who devised the overweight and obese classifications for children, admits this. As he said: ‘The idea that these numbers are cast in stone is absolute nonsense.’

Moreover, there is little connection between the BMI classifications of overweight and obese and increased risk for disease and death, either in children or adults. A recent Aberdeen study found that children’s BMIs were not associated with increased risk for stroke or heart disease in later life.

The studies by Flegal (at the US Center for Disease Control) and Gronniger have found that the lowest death rates are for those in the overweight category of BMI 25-25.9. Indeed, this group was most likely to live the longest. Gronniger’s study reported that moderately obese men had the same mortality rate as ‘normal’ weight men. Other studies have found that those who are overweight have the lowest risk for both total mortality and cardiovascular mortality compared with ‘normal’ weight individuals.

Finally, the BMI’s very arbitrariness and unscientific character allows it to be manipulated by both special interests, such as the weight-loss and pharmaceutical industries and politicians. The BMI has become the red flag of the obesity epidemic – immensely useful for frightening everyone into believing that they are too fat and in imminent peril of death, not to say increasing their already obsessive interest in dieting and weight loss.

With the change in where the BMI overweight line was drawn, millions of people went to bed normal and woke up suddenly ‘overweight’, despite no evidence that their weight posed any danger to their health. If two-thirds of the population comes to believe that their BMIs say that they are either overweight or obese, then there are immense profits to be made and political empires to be built in providing them with the means to slim down and become ‘normal’.

Patrick Basham and John Luik are co-authors, with Gio Gori, of Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, a Social Affairs Unit book.


http://www.spiked-online.com/index..../earticle/5200/

The BMI chart says that I am still overweight at 155 lbs...whatever. The last time I weighed 155 I barely had any fat at all. No wonder women have issues with their weight!

Sounds like an excerpt from a book I reviewed The Diet Myth by Paul Campos. Good book.

I had a cousin who weighed over 1200 pounds (yes that is right 1200) and my parents' fears that I would be superfat like Jack came true because the dieting was imposed on me as a young child. Thus, an eating/bingeing disorder was born. Now here I am.

I wonder how many of us here started that dieting downspiral and consequent weight gain because of such official-sounding, arbitrary, opinion-based "truth."

Another chapter in the Good Calories, Bad Calories vein. Love it. Someday the truth will get out.

I read somewhere that the BMI chart was created by Met Life - with no basis in science. I'd have to find the book to find the cite for that info. I wonder if it's actually true?

Sounds logical. They could raise their life insurance rates and blame YOU for it.

actually it was developed in the mid-1800's and was just used as a tool within population density... it was never meant to diagnose individual people. since the only basis for measurement is height and weight, the scientific community understands that it makes gross assumptions and is going to be inaccurate. it would have most of the american gladiators as overweight.

It's so popular because it's so easy and it's obtained from data that is very available. Then organizations discovered they could make sweeping generalization and thus generate attention/funding for themselves.

You see this over and over and over. This whole cholesterol obsession is so enduring because it's an easy to obtain number and can be "treated" with medication. Then it gives doctors and patients the impression that they are getting something for their money because they are being "treated".

The pharma/medical complex is just a big bloated industry where the actual real health of patients is not a factor. Not because the doctors don't care, but because everyone has been conditioned to see disease as a series of symptoms that need to be treated with drugs and/or surgical operations.

Oh my gosh! Someone with a similar story! My mother was obese and though she couldn't control her weight she controled my sisters and I. To make my case worse my sisters are petite and I'm normally boned. I couldn't be smaller than my sisters if I tried... and trust me I did. I have been dieting since age 6. My biggest sadness that I spend more time worrying about what I'm eating than anything else.

Here's a little background info from Wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index

From Wikipedia: "The body mass index (BMI), or Quetelet index, is a statistical measure of the weight of a person scaled according to height. As such, it is useful as a population measure only, and is not appropriate for diagnosing individuals."

For example, at my height for me to be in the middle of the "normal weight" I would have to lose a leg at the hip. When I was 18 years old and came out of basic training I weighed 148 pounds. I looked like I escaped from the Auschwitz death camp. I kid you not. That would make me a 21.8 on the BMI scale, "normal weight".

Funny thing is, I grew another inch and a half in the next year and a half, and put on some muscle. My shoulders got wider, my chest got bigger, my thighs and calves got much bigger, etc. etc. etc. Umm, I finished physically maturing.

When I was 27 I was in the best shape of my life and weighed 195 pounds. That would put me 2 points away from being obese according to the charts. Sheer madness. I believe I read an article here several months ago about a person in the United Kingdom being denied surgery because of a high BMI. That scares the crap out of me.

What if my health insurance company decides to raise my rates because of my BMI?

Yeah, I only found out about that (BMI) from Penn and Teller's show bull----
Those guys are great!