I’m extra-large frame and I was extremely thin at the low end of normal, but still healthy and looked normal weight at the high end of normal. I think your frame and how you carry your weight, as well as your body composition has a lot to do with it. I am 5’10” and I’ve weighed underweight to obese at different stages in life. Why is the body mass index calculated as mass/height2, not as mass/height3? Human allometry: adult bodies are more nearly geometrically similar than regression analysis has suggested Weight-height relationships and body mass index: some observations from the Diverse Populations Ethnicity, obesity, and risk of type 2 diabetes in women: a 20-year follow-up study Indices of relative weight and obesity, Journal of Chronic Disease National Institute of Health, Assessing Your Weight and Health Risk. A better alternative for individuals is a fat measuring caliper. In reality, such indices are better suited for population studies rather than assessing the healthiness of an individual’s weight. However, the other issues with strictly mass and height indices remain, such as not accounting for body composition. Note, though, that for whatever exponent is entered for an average height person with a given weight, the reported BBMI remains the same.īy using the BBMI, short and tall people should be less likely to be marked as underweight and overweight, respectively. For this reason, the calculator provided at the beginning of this article provides a field for alternate exponents. The true exponent likely varies for ethnicity, gender, and many other variables. The metric and imperial versions of the BBMI are as follows: Metric (kg and m):Ī 2.5 exponent is merely an estimate. A correction factor is also applied to ensure that average height people wind up with a BBMI equal to their BMI. The Better Body Mass Index (BBMI), proposed in this article, compromises between quadratic and cubic by incorporating a 2.5 exponent in the formula. It is most likely that humans scale somewhere in between quadratic and cubic, as some studies have found. Yet, taller people tend to appear skinnier than shorter people (proportions are not maintained). So while the BMI predicts that humans scale in two dimensions, much like a sheet of paper might, the cubic relationship would imply that humans scale isometrically (proportions are maintained). Though there have been studies finding the implied quadratic relationship, there are many that report higher order relationships, as far up as cubic. Another issue is that the BMI is not specific to gender nor ethnicity, despite women generally having a higher body fat percentage and healthy BMI varying between ethnicities (Asians with increased BMI are at greater risk for type 2 diabetes ).įor both short and tall people, there is yet another problem, and that is that the relationship between mass and height suggested by the BMI formula may be in error. ![]() This short coming limits the usefulness of the index. Muscle is denser than fat, and thus a muscular person may have a misleadingly high BMI despite having a body fat content not unconducive to good health. Despite this simplicity though, and advancements in computing, it is still used today for such tasks as determining insurance premiums.Ī common criticism of the BMI is that it disregards body composition. ![]() Its simplicity was a primary factor in its rise in popularity. The formula became known as the BMI after Ancel Keys’ 1972 publication, “Indices of relative weight and obesity”. The formula for the BMI was first conceived by Adolphe Quitelet (then known as the Quitelet index) and related in such works as, “A Treatise On Man”. The metric and imperial versions of the BMI are as follows: Metric (kg and m): The NIH suggests using the Body Mass Index (BMI) in combination with the above evaluation table to assess the healthiness of body mass. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) advises that excessive body fat corresponds with a higher risk of various diseases including heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, gallstones, breathing problems, and certain cancers.
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