4 ms·

About two hundred years past time.

bell-cot 2y ago
Wow - I thought "two hundred years" was figurative. But: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#History And Wikipedia version of things is pretty damn damning: > History > Obesity and BMI > Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, devised the basis of the BMI between 1830 and 1850 as he developed what he called "social physics".[3] Quetelet himself never intended for the index, then called the Quetelet Index, to be used as a means of medical assessment. Instead, it was a component of his study of l'homme moyen, or the average man. Quetelet thought of the average man as a social ideal, and developed the body mass index as a means of discovering the socially ideal human person.[4] According to Lars Grue and Arvid Heiberg in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Quetelet's idealization of the average man would be elaborated upon by Francis Galton a decade later in the development of Eugenics.[5] > The modern term "body mass index" (BMI) for the ratio of human body weight to squared height was coined in a paper published in the July 1972 edition of the Journal of Chronic Diseases by Ancel Keys and others. In this paper, Keys argued that what he termed the BMI was "if not fully satisfactory, at least as good as any other relative weight index as an indicator of relative obesity".[6][7][8] > The interest in an index that measures body fat came with observed increasing obesity in prosperous Western societies. Keys explicitly judged BMI as appropriate for population studies and inappropriate for individual evaluation. Nevertheless, due to its simplicity, it has come to be widely used for preliminary diagnoses.[9] Additional metrics, such as waist circumference, can be more useful.[10]
- yawpitch 2y ago
  Oh how I wish it was figurative. Well done for reading up on the ridiculous history of one of the most ridiculous measures. Now try to not go down the rabbit hole of the calorie.

Wow - I thought "two hundred years" was figurative. But: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#History And Wikipedia version of things is pretty damn damning: > History > Obesity and BMI > Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, devised the basis of the BMI between 1830 and 1850 as he developed what he called "social physics".[3] Quetelet himself never intended for the index, then called the Quetelet Index, to be used as a means of medical assessment. Instead, it was a component of his study of l'homme moyen, or the average man. Quetelet thought of the average man as a social ideal, and developed the body mass index as a means of discovering the socially ideal human person.[4] According to Lars Grue and Arvid Heiberg in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Quetelet's idealization of the average man would be elaborated upon by Francis Galton a decade later in the development of Eugenics.[5] > The modern term "body mass index" (BMI) for the ratio of human body weight to squared height was coined in a paper published in the July 1972 edition of the Journal of Chronic Diseases by Ancel Keys and others. In this paper, Keys argued that what he termed the BMI was "if not fully satisfactory, at least as good as any other relative weight index as an indicator of relative obesity".[6][7][8] > The interest in an index that measures body fat came with observed increasing obesity in prosperous Western societies. Keys explicitly judged BMI as appropriate for population studies and inappropriate for individual evaluation. Nevertheless, due to its simplicity, it has come to be widely used for preliminary diagnoses.[9] Additional metrics, such as waist circumference, can be more useful.[10]

yawpitch 2y ago
Oh how I wish it was figurative. Well done for reading up on the ridiculous history of one of the most ridiculous measures. Now try to not go down the rabbit hole of the calorie.