>BMI is such a stupid, useless metric. Yes, but it makes it trivial to get a good p-value, so people use it. The state of nutritional epidemiology is abysmal,

>BMI is such a stupid, useless metric. Yes, but it makes it trivial to get a good p-value, so people use it. The state of nutritional epidemiology is abysmal, and has been for much longer than that of social psych. The thing is, we have better measures than BMI, many of which are dead simple (e.g. % body fat as measured by calipers, or waist measurement). I also wish nutritional epidemiologists would stop using linear models all the time -- it's well known that mortality curves are U-shaped, as excessively thin people have high rates of all-cause mortality. Returning to your original point, I'm 6'3" and 220 lbs. I have 12% body fat. Somehow this makes me fat, according to BMI.