Rekha Kumar, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College, said that some patients who have lost weight and reached what she sees as their “healthy, happy weight,” but who still have a high B.M.I., may feel that they have to unnecessarily or unrealistically drop more pounds to be considered normal on the scale. It can be if it’s used to set arbitrary goal posts for body size. “Nevertheless, they’re being used to create a universal standard.” Can B.M.I. “Women and people of color are largely not represented in many of these data,” Dr. But body composition and its relationship with health can vary depending on your gender, race and ethnicity. is that it was developed and validated mostly in white men, said Sabrina Strings, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Janet Tomiyama, lead author of the study and an associate professor of health psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.Īnother problem with B.M.I. can “label a huge swath of our population as somehow aberrant because of their weight, even if they’re perfectly healthy,” said A. And as people age, it’s common to lose muscle and bone mass but gain abdominal fat, a change in body composition that would be concerning for health but might go unnoticed if it didn’t change a person’s B.M.I., Dr. This explains why muscular athletes often have high B.M.I.s despite having little body fat. can’t tell, for instance, what percentage of a person’s weight is from their fat, muscle or bone. Yoni Freedhoff, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa.ī.M.I. Does it accurately describe individual health?įor all its utility as a research tool, though, body mass index is “fairly useless when looking at the individual,” said Dr. is also easy and inexpensive to measure, which is why it is still used in research studies and doctor’s offices today. It also has a “J-shaped” relationship with mortality very low and very high B.M.I.s are associated with greater risk of dying sooner, whereas the “normal” to “overweight” range is associated with lower mortality risk.Īs Dr. On average, people with a higher body mass index have more body fat, so it can be useful for tracking rates of obesity, which have nearly tripled globally over the last several decades. is generally associated with greater risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer, she said. Research has shown that across large groups of people, higher B.M.I. JoAnn Manson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It is a very useful tool in epidemiologic research,” said Dr. And, in fact, some said they would indeed call it a scam. was a very useful measure of a person’s health. But after talking with an epidemiologist, two obesity medicine physicians, a health psychologist and a sociologist, none claimed that B.M.I. Many feel judged by these categories, given that only about a quarter of adults in the United States can call themselves “normal” on the B.M.I. The result, which slots you into one of four main categories, is meant to describe your body in a single word or two: underweight (B.M.I.

Its formula is simple: Take your weight (in kilograms), and divide by the square of your height (in meters). We encounter it not just at doctor’s offices, but with online calculators and smart scales, at gyms and even when determining eligibility for the Covid vaccine. There are few single measures in health care that seem to carry as much weight as body mass index, or B.M.I.

Body mass index calculator for male