im p sure the creator of the bmi said it wasn’t supposed to be used on singular people because its not accurate on a small scale,,,,, and the parameters for obesity have been moved so much it doesn’t mean shit anymore so,,,

fatphobiabusters:

ok2befat:

fatphobiabusters:

Hope you don’t mind me chiming in here!

To quote Lisbeth Leftwich:

BMI is not a medically relevant scale. In fact, BMI doesn’t even provide an accurate depiction of your overall health. All BMI does is divide weight by height and produce a fairly arbitrary number.

And this number can have consequences. A study published in the International Journal of Obesity reports that “nearly 75 million adults in the US are misclassified as either healthy or unhealthy when BMI is used as the sole health indicator.” Essentially, when more precise cardiometabolic tests are used, they indicate the medical irrelevance of BMI.

So why do doctors still rely on BMI? Many people agree that it’s because BMI is cheap and easy. All a doctor needs to calculate it is their patient’s height and weight. But, while BMI is accurate in this calculation (i.e. dividing that weight by that height and producing a number), the number it produces is arbitrary and an inaccurate representation of that person’s health.

Inaccuracy shouldn’t have a place in any medical discipline.

This is from the TIME article linked above:

For years, scientists have said that BMI can’t distinguish between fat and muscle, which tends to be heavier and can tip more toned individuals into overweight status, even if their fat levels are low. In the journal Science, the latest data from University of Pennsylvania shows that BMI also doesn’t tease apart different types of fat, each of which can have different metabolic effects on health. BMI cannot take into consideration, for example, where the body holds fat. Belly fat, which is known as visceral fat, is more harmful than fat that simply sitting under the skin. Visceral fat develops deep among muscles and around organs like the liver and by releasing certain hormones and other agents, it disrupts the body’s ability to balance its energy needs. Even relatively thin people can have high levels of visceral fat, which means they might be considered healthy by BMI standards, but internally they may actually be at higher risk of developing health problems related to weigh gain.

And from the NPR article linked above:

1. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.

The BMI was introduced in the early 19th century by a Belgian named Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet. He was a mathematician, not a physician. He produced the formula to give a quick and easy way to measure the degree of obesity of the general population to assist the government in allocating resources. In other words, it is a 200-year-old hack.

And the CDC, which is a fatphobic mess for a number of reasons, even says:

autistictaramaclay:

^^ ye

BMI can be used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems but it is not diagnostic of the body fatness or health of an individual.

If you’re wondering what’s wrong with the CDC, I recommend going here and here. @ok2befat had a great post about them that I can’t find now.

Here’s a bit more on BMI.

-Mod Bella 

Hello!  This is my CDC specific post, the CDC stuff is at the bottom as a rebuttal.

And this is my article about the history of the institutionalization of fat stigma, which also contains information about BMI as a standard, the 300k deaths number that is frequently cited and the CDC as well.

Thank you!

-Mod Bella