4 ms·
The irony of BMI is that people with plenty of muscle mass are more likely to have a high BMI as well as lowered risk for heart disease. BMI was never meant to
by sublinear 2mo ago
The irony of BMI is that people with plenty of muscle mass are more likely to have a high BMI as well as lowered risk for heart disease.
BMI was never meant to be used as a diagnostic measure. BMI is just a rough filter for large data sets, and entirely dependent on the average height and habits of that population.
Anyone taller than about 6'3" could tell you the recommended weight according to their BMI has always been absurdly low. If it's a printed chart on the wall, they might not even be on it.
- rKarpinski 2mo agoThis is a common misconception. BMI while an ok population metric, for individual's the biggest problem with is its poor sensitivity - it fails to classify people as obese who are obese. Using your 6 3" male as an example, they are significantly more likely to be clinically obese (using waist circumference, body fat % etc) at a weight lower than BMI cut-off of 240 lbs.
- sn9 2mo agoIt only fails to classify people with excess body fat who are in the healthy weight range. It's really good at catching people who are obese who are overweight.
- GuB-42 2mo agoBMI is not a good metric for really short and really tall people. The "ideal weight" of a person is proportional to height to an exponent somewhere between 2 and 3. Simple physics would say 3 but because tall people are not just scaled up copies of small people, it is closer to 2 in practice, maybe around 2.3, but we say 2 because it is easier to calculate. The downside is that BMI overestimates the "ideal weight" for short people and underestimate it for tall people. But BMI is not great at capturing exceptions anyways, so there is little interest in "fixing" this.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoAmericans that are 6'3" (190.5cm) are about 1.5% of the population. It is a tiny fraction of the population.
- sublinear 2mo agoIt's like 25% of the men in my family. I am but a mere 6'1". What do?
- throwaway2037 2mo agoI don't understand. Is this a humble brag?
- sublinear 2mo ago?? No. I'm saying that since height is genetic, being too tall or too short for BMI happens in clusters. There are also specific activities that select for tallness or shortness (basketball, horse racing, pilots, etc.) concentrating attention on the topic even further. It's not a fringe problem when you have whole groups of people against an idea. I'm just telling you why BMI has never been taken seriously by a lot more people than those directly affected. This is an insight worth having far beyond just BMI. Most rough stats are rejected by the public for exactly the same reasons. The problem with BMI isn't its existence, but its abuse and marketing. People abuse stats all the time and this is a really glaringly obvious one that needed to be taken down decades ago.