Justin Ryder, associate professor of surgery and pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.ĥ healthy habits that are easy to add to your day Still, there is a role for the use of BMI in the doctor’s office, said Dr. “It is difficult to provide healthy weight ranges for children and teens because the interpretation of BMI depends on weight, height, age, and sex,” the CDC noted.Īs a result, parents should never use an adult BMI calculator to determine their child’s weight status, the CDC said. The use of BMI for children is also problematic, according to the CDC, because a child’s healthy weight range is based on a BMI between the 5th and 85th percentile on the CDC growth charts. More conundrums: Women naturally have more body fat and less muscle mass than men, while some racial and ethnic groups are genetically predisposed to carry more or less lean muscle mass and body fat. Conversely, BMI can underestimate body fat in older adults and anyone who has lost muscle, according to the Harvard T.H. Muscle and bone weigh more than fat, so BMI measurements can overestimate body fat in athletes and people with a muscular build or a larger body frame. People are considered underweight if their BMI is lower than 18.5. Frazao Studio Latino/Getty ImagesĪs currently defined, a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is a healthy weight, between 25 and 29.5 is overweight, between 30 and 34.9 is obese, between 35 and 39.5 is class 2 obesity, and anything over 40 is “severe” or class 3 obesity, which used to be called morbid obesity. The term BMI perpetuates misconceptions about body weight by lumping individuals into arbitrary categories, critics say. (For the mathematically challenged, the National Institutes of Health has a free calculator to do the work for you.) To calculate adult BMI, weight is divided by the square root of a person’s height. “She could easily say, ‘I am in perfectly good health, so just take your BMI of 25 and shove it.’” “But she may be incredibly muscular, and she may have most of her weight in her lower body, where it’s not as damaging to her health as weight in the upper body,” he said. She would be on the cusp of being overweight with a BMI of 25,” said Wadden, the former director of Perelman’s Center for Weight and Eating Disorders. “Consider a young woman who is 5 feet 5 inches and 150 pounds. And it’s not true,” Vibbert said.Ī BMI measurement can be flat wrong in some cases, said Thomas Wadden, professor of psychology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “Yet it has become completely medicalized that health equals weight, weight equals health based on BMI. Project HEAL is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to helping people with disordered eating. “I put ‘obesity’ in quotes because I personally find it to be a slur,” said anti-weight discrimination advocate Susan Vibbert, who serves on Project HEAL’s board of directors. “Our society and social media say, ‘You have to be thinner you are not good enough unless you are thin.’ Nor can you be healthy if you’re not thin, whereas you can be healthy and large, just as you can be unhealthy and thin,” said registered nurse Joann Hendelman, clinical director of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders.ĭon’t use sugar substitutes for weight loss, World Health Organization advises Even with all the backlash against “fat shaming,” weight stigma against the seriously overweight or obese remains deep-rooted, according to research. Yet critics say the term BMI has become a societal judgment by lumping individuals into arbitrary categories that perpetuate misconceptions about body weight. Research has found that as BMI climbs, so does the risk for chronic conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, respiratory problems, stroke, mental illness, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, physical pain and at least 13 types of cancer, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For those studies, separating populations of people into weight categories by BMI works well. It was invented for researchers to use on masses of people to see how weight affects the development of disease and chronic health conditions. Short for body mass Index, BMI is nothing more than a crude measurement of a person’s body fat based on height and weight.
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