Doctors urged not to rely on BMI to assess health

The American Medical Association is no longer recommending the use of body mass index as a measure of weight, after years of controversy and criticism around the metric.

The scales are formally shifting on body mass index (BMI), a measurement that’s been the source of much scorn in recent years.

Invented in 1832 by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and mathematician, it was adopted by governments around the world in the 80s as a way to determine the health of the population.

The calculation however (which takes someone’s weight in kilograms and divides it by the square of their height in metres to tell them if they’re ‘underweight,’ ‘healthy,’ or ‘obese’) was originally intended for the ‘average man’ and so used to define what was ‘normal’ in the 19^th century – namely white European men.

This, of course, is heavily discriminatory and disregards the fact that a healthy weight changes depending on race, gender, and age.

BMI also doesn’t distinguish between fat, muscle, and bone density, which means that most professional athletes are classified as overweight.

It also doesn’t take into account where on the body the fat is carried – visceral fat around your organs is considered more dangerous than other areas of the body, for example around the hips.

In 2016, a study by UCLA concluded that tens of millions of people who had overweight and obese BMI scores were actually perfectly healthy. And that 30 percent of people with ‘healthy’ BMIs were, in fact, not healthy at all.