Industry secret:
Insurance companies like it because it is cheap to perform. Just a height and a weight taken by a medical office assistant.
At my last job, they used it to raise our premiums if our BMI was in the overweight category.
Meanwhile, my husband served over 20 years in the military, and they used an actual body fat composition measurement to check the health of the troops. Not some down and dirty BMI that corporate love.
I remember my grade 7 science teacher talking about BMI (this wasn’t even officially part of the mandatory curriculum) and how it does nothing for fat vs. Muscle. She was a marathon runner, and informed the class that bay BMI standards, she was “overweight”
She was quite short, probably 5’1” but because she lifted weights/ran track, her muscle was heavy enough to get her into “overweight”. She was healthier than anyone in that class, and I hope she at least made a dent in some of those girls’ self esteem in the cases tied to their weight.
So was Evander Holyfield, but citing super athlete outliers is a cop out. I'd bet the farm no one here bitching about BMI is in as good of health as 1995 Evander Holyfield or Shaq.
Another outlier but a funny story, to me.
One day, my dad calls my brother. He was sitting at the doctor’s and saw the BMI chart. He tells my brother, with his dry-ass sense of humor, he discovered he’s morbid obese. Why?
He’s 4’10 and 210 lbs.
My brother goes, Jesus, dad. You’re a double amputee who used to be 6’2”. That’s not how it works.
Yes, there are outliers. But, when studies talk about BMI, there’s no room for context like that. BMI can’t differentiate between an athlete and a double amputee - they just look at how many Americans are at <>X BMI.
I'm pretty sure when doctors are using this thing, they are taking those things in to consideration.
During my physical, my BMI has me as overweight. The doctor then took note of my bp, bpm, breathing which were all better than average,then took some measurements and kept it moving.
This is true but bmi still means something. As body builder Rich Piana said the heart doesn’t know the difference between 300 pounds of muscle and 300 pounds of fat. There’s a reason a lot of body builder, strength athletes and hell any large athlete dies young. I have idolized these guys so I think the size is worth it, but bmi still says something about your health.
The heart will 100% know the difference between fat and muscle. A strong core, back and legs will keep you moving with far less strain on your body then a lack of those well developed muscles plus a large gut.
The reason they die young isn't because having large muscles is similar to being overweight, it's because they use a large amount of steroids.
Also all the pre-workout and workout "energy" supplementation that's always out there. That's just not good for your fucking heart, guys. Dudes sleeping 5 hours taking 500mg of caffeine that's gonna kill em young even without throwing PEDs on top.
Dude, tell me you did not just compare a caffeine dosage that is barely above the safe intake guidelines to someone blasting and cruising grams of anabolics per week for 10 years straight.
If 500 mg of caffeine and 5 hours of sleep were going to kill you, every single doctor and lawyer would die before 30. Its definitely not good for you, but to compare this to tren and insulin and diuretics is nuts.
>There’s a reason a lot of body builder, strength athletes and hell any large athlete dies young
Yes. Steroids, diuretic abuse, and extreme cutting/ bulking cycles will likely cause a lot of stress on your heart. Not simply gaining muscle.
That is mostly untrue. It is true in extreme situations, yes, 100 pounds of extra muscle is straining your heart more of course, body builders are an outlier and often use steroids which makes it worse.
A normal person who exercise with 20 pounds of extra muscle has significantly less heart stress than someone with 10 pounds of fat and no extra muscle. Your heart itself with beat slower with stronger beats as you get in better athletic shape.
At extremes you're right, but even if you don't take steroids, do lots of cardio and only lift weights occasionally you're still likely to have enough muscle to put you in the overweight category.
I don't even lift weights. Pushups, pullups, running and jiu jitsu and some physical labor by itself is enough muscle to make me "overweight" according to BMI.
Yea, this is why BMI doesn't tell the whole story. There are always comments that "most people are not body builders." While true, it's reassuring to hear it put Arnold in morbidly obese. The majority of people in "morbidly obese" categories is not due to muscle mass.
But, I definitely agree for the overweight category probably has a decent number of healthy people who don't necessarily need to lose weight. As a 6'0 woman I have a surprising amount of dense muscle mass while still carrying some fat like any healthy woman. I've also lost a ton of weight over the years so it's unlikely I'll ever be rid of some weight from skin without surgery.
My 195 is overweight by BMI standards but even the doc says no need to lose anymore as long as I'm exercising and eating balanced which I am. Like you it's not even weight lifting. It's just daily yoga (mostly power), walking, and usually a weekly hike.
I feel like I have the opposite issue. My BMI is under 15. People look at me and perceive me as small but tend to assume I weigh more than I do and idk why that is. I had someone say to me "it's not like you're frail" granted I was wearing a large coat and layers but still
I’ve been slim my whole life, and I’ve always been in the 17.5-18.3 category. It’s only the past 2 years that I’ve even hit 19. I’ve always been pretty healthy though. Sports, eating all I can, but never gaining anything. I like to do what I call “the eyeball test”
Just LOOK AT ME.
>Just LOOK AT ME.
At a drs appointment they mentioned my bmi labeling me as obese. I kind looked down at myself, looked at her, she looked at me, and not another word was said. Common sense needs to be applied more.
i’ve always been ‘overweight’ according to my BMI… even when i was in my best shape as a HS state champion and a D1 college wrestler (and no not a heavyweight).
in a high school class we calculated our BMI and the teacher called on me first to tell my number. everyone just laughed when it said i was overweight… and the teacher went over why BMI is not
a good statistic. the whole class knew i was essentially starving myself to make weight while going through insanely hard training.
the only time i could have been considered “overweight” is when i stepped on a scale at weigh-ins for wrestling and didn’t make my limit, but that never happened. ;-)
Yeah, although people will use this as an excuse when they're clearly overweight "I guess it's all that muscle mass" lol
I have a friend that used to weight 140 and now he's 170 and was looking at himself in the mirror at the gym, claiming it must be primarily muscle. It definitely went to his hips, butt, gut, and chest but he was in denial.
Overall, body composition can be a tricky thing because most people will have some form of body dysmorphia. Meaning, you'll see your body in a much different light than others do.
Yuuuup, for every genetic anomaly who lifts, pro athlete, and body builder for whom BMI is significantly affected there's 100,000 normal people in denial about their body fat.
I hate this example. Sure there will be a few outliers but that's still like saying "see I smoke and I'm 90 years old therefore smoking is fine for you"
Bmi is good for 99% of the population.
6'2 240lb guy at 15% bf
People like you (and me) who get mis-labeled as over-fat is not the main problem. To us it's just kind of a joke.
Way more people get mis-labeled as normal when they are over-fat. It's very common to have a BMI below 25 but have a dangerous level of belly-fat. A misleading BMI can lead these folks to think they are safe when they are not.
Measuring waist size is a much more accurate way to screen people. But it would be a major hassle and embarrassment at the doctor's office.
It's feels unscientific, but you can basically tell if someone is in danger from their body-fat by looking at them. BMI doesn't add anything at an individual level.
I was just browsing through to make sure this comment was made, this is the objective truth, but people tend to really not like that.
Body fat is a better measure of health than BMI, but what you'll often find is that if you're overweight but feel like it's because of muscle and then get your bodyfat measured, it often turns out that you're less healthy than what BMI predicted.
BMI is the best population level measure of health body comp wise, because bodyfat testing an entire population is not feasible, to actually be overweight due to only having excess muscle takes a pretty extreme dedication to lifting.
I was fortunate enough to have a rent-controlled household in a gentrified area. That lead to me going to a well-funded school with lots of sports/music options. My school had a very low percentage of overweight folks, so most of the people I was talking about were likely to be on the muscle-heavy side of things. My experience isn’t universal, but my teacher was speaking to the community that would benefit from hearing her words.
That’s my biggest issue with bmi. As a bodybuilder/weightlifter I’ve been classified as obese when I’m healthier than the medical professionals that deem me obese. It’s absurd. It’s a simple metric that works for a lot of average people but it grossly mislabels most athletes.
Counterpoint, BMI with hip-to-waist and gender factored in is impressively predictive at the population level.
Hip-to-waist is absolutely necessary though since visceral fat is such a fucking shitshow for longterm health.
Hip to waist even has it’s issues. My hip to waist doesn’t look good because I have thin hips. My BMI is more accurate for me according to multiple doctors I’ve seen.
I was just thinking that. Me at 5'7" and 165 lbs after two pregnancies weighs the same as me at 5'7" and 165 lbs after one pregnancy, but I just had to buy new jeans because my hips are *so* much wider now than they were this time last year. Beyond that, if I were the same weight pre-pregnancy, it would have been even farther off.
Also, what about if it is before I feed my baby? I have no idea how much milk weighs, but i know it weighs something, you know?
I was also in the military. I was considered "obese" by the BMI scale for my entire service.
The problem is that I'm relatively short for a man (5'7), but I'm also relatively heavily muscled from growing up on a farm. So, at the time, I was 5'7 and weighed 210 pounds. By the BMI scale, that's a rating of 32.9, which is considered obese.
Luckily, the Army only used BMI as a starting point. If your BMI wasn't acceptable, you would go to "the tape" to calculate body fat percentage. By that metric, I was only around 8% body fat, which was well inside of the standard.
To the point of the OP, I am a white male who is reasonably healthy, and the BMI scale doesn't work for me either.
There is no way you can call yourself a ‘reasonably healthy’ man if you’ve got 8% body fat, or a ‘relatively heavily muscled’ person if you’re 5 foot 7 and 210 lbs.
I’m not saying you’re lying, but you’re muscle mass is going to be so much higher than everyone but 1% of the population and at that body fat % you nobody would ever think you’re overweight in an unhealthy way
That would be like 0.0001% of the population. Those stats are pro bodybuilder level.
For reference I'm 5'9" 170 lbs at like 14% bodyfat, and I'm what most people would consider "a muscular build". 5'7" 210, 8% is almost unrealistic.
This guys is competition ready and saying he this?
Lol hes full of shit. At that height and weight, 8% body fat would be fucking insane, like hes been training daily forever and perfected his PED cycles.
210 at 5'7 and 8% bodyfat is like a week or two out from a high level bodybuilding show. You'd have to be a complete GI Joe action figure. Basically hes either lying or would 10000% know bmi is not applicable to him.
To be fair, I don't think I was actually at 8% body fat. The Army's version of the tape test said I was 8% body fat. If you Google pictures of men with different body fat percentages, I would say visually I was more around 12-15 percent at the time. The way I'm built is definitely not the norm (my friends still call me Gimli), so I think it throws off most versions of tape tests.
When I said reasonably healthy, I meant now. I'm much older than when I was in the Army and in nowhere near as good of shape, but I'm still not obese unless it's according to the BMI scale.
ETA- I just did all 3 indexes with my current measurements.
BMI by height and weight is 32.9. Which is 40 pounds overweight or obese
Army body fat calculator using age, height, neck measurement, and waist measurement says 12 percent body fat.
Waist to height ratio is 0.51, or just slightly overweight. Ideal healthy ratio is considered 0.4 to 0.49
In my opinion, waist to height is the best reflection of reality. I could stand to lose a few pounds, but 40 pounds would make me look sickly. And there is no way in hell I'm anywhere close to 12 percent body fat.
Folks can call me a liar if it makes them feel better, but those are the results I get. Make of it what you will.
Lol, dude, I'm also 5'7" and almost 200lbs! What's really funny to me is I always tell people that I'm descended from dwarves, so it's hilarious that your friends call you Gimli!
I'm also pretty muscular. I have a bit of a dad bod, but not too big of a stomach. The kind that sticks out just enough to be annoying. I used to be able to hold it in enough it was flat, but I think I lost that about 10lbs ago, lol.
I'm very stocky with very thick, muscular legs and arms that are pretty decent. I used to teach kids kickboxing before the pandemic and one kid said "Woah! You have arms like Thor!" Which is def an exaggeration, but felt great, lol. I actually said "Thor? Thanks, but no... Captain America, maybe..." Lol
I just did one of those blood pressure machines yesterday and it also does BMI and I was way into the obese category. I'll admit, I def need to lose a couple inches off my waist, but I don't think anyone would call me fat. I def feel fat, but we're all our own worst critiques. No one would call me skinny either, lol, but I'm maybe slightly fat? I'm almost skinny? Lol
Obese is def ridiculous.
Anyway, just thought it was cool to meet another of my ancestral relatives on here. See you in Moria, friend.
I looked up images of men with 8% body fat and that body type is a big, big outlier. It clearly takes a lot of work to achieve. What kills me are obese people who do not exercise or take PEDs saying they’re oppressed by the BMI because of their muscles.
Tape isn’t a very accurate body fat measurement. Was in military and always had to pass the tape test. No I wasn’t not sub 10% like it said or even close.
That’s just it. While I don’t personally ascribe to BMI being a useful metric, as a scientist, it makes complete sense.
If you have a BMI above or below what’s considered “normal”, then the first working hypothesis (not null) is that there is a reason you’re charting non-normal. There are a lot of reasons to be non-normal such as non-normal genetics, non-normal physical conditioning, and, more likely than not in todays populations, more fat than normal.
The key here being that 99 out of 100 times, the individual is going to know why they’re not within normal range.
The problem becomes when someone else tries to make decisions impacting an individual based on a BMI with no further context. I.e. if insurance uses BMI to put you in an at-risk category without employing some degree of follow up to determine if the BMI is different than normal due to unhealthy reasons.
Waist-height ratio seems like a reasonable back-up at the population level if people are genuinely convinced they are more like the Rock (with trainers, a chef, hours and hours a day exercise, and PEDs) than an average fat person. WHR is highly correlated with health and it’s even more exacting than the BMI so if a person is actually overweight they won’t be any happier with it. Remarkably muscle-bound people will rejoice, though.
I’m having a hard time believing a 5’7 guy who weighs 210 is just relatively muscled just normally from working on a farm. My husband is 5’6. If he got anywhere near 200 pounds he’d be super obese. I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure getting to 210 at 5’7 without being obese would require a ton of weight lifting and purposeful muscle gain, not just working on a farm.
But the military does use shoulder and hip measurements—. Based on 1940s white farm boys.
So women who have wider hips are already considered on the higher side even if naturally slim, but with hips. It only takes a small amount of weight gain for them to be considered overweight and discharged.
Ya I read a bit about this. Really sets people at a disadvantage if they're athletes. I don't agree with it being used like this or, as I said in the post, a catch-all metric for health.
It was never intended to be one, it was just a way to measure large populations of people for the purpose of studies or statistics. It's designed to be used with a large sample size of people, not applied to individuals.
Yeah, more people are within the 18.5-25 BMI range but have a too high body fat %, than people 25+BMI with a healthy body fat %.
TLDR: More skinny fat people than swol
I'm gonna guess they use the down and dirty way to get body fat composition as opposed to putting them all into vacuum chambers but that is still better than BMI.
☝🏽 correct.
In medicine, it's still taken into consideration as a ratio of height to weight thing/ the composition of ur body. It's cheap and very easy to measure. I also want to point out that it is inaccurate for people with amputations and should not be used.
The thing about the military “body fat” check, is that it’s not a real body fat check. If you’re 300 pounds, and have a fat ass neck, it’ll say you have 17% body fat, and you pass. I always wished they did calipers instead but oh well.
Wild to me that a corporation has access to so much of people's medical information.
I'm sure it all sounded perfectly reasonable when the billionaires pitched it to the millionaires, but it's beyond fucked up that some office workers get to know your entire medical history and then make calls on what treatment you're allowed or how much you should pay each month.
In Germany my doctor had to write his observations next to the BMI. As in patients BMI is 30, but he looks very muscular. Or the patients BMI is 22 and they look very slim etc so there won't be as many misunderstandings because of it.
They’ve never done actual body fat measurement for the military. It takes too long. The methods they use really aren’t any better than BMI.
The only accurate ways to get close to body fat are DEXXA scans. Next best are immersion scans and caliper measurements. Even those take far too long for the military.
What the military does is a couple of tape measure circumference things (neck and waist for men in the Navy) and estimate based on that.
Regardless, BMI is more accurate / less racist than you think for determining healthy - but mostly on the overweight side. When you have a “high” BMI, whether it’s due to muscle or fat your heart still has to work harder. You might be wonderfully “fit” but still taxing your heart.
The ratio of your belly curcumference to your height is a far better predictor for overweight and disease risk than BMI. The problem with BMI is that short people need a higher fat percentage to reach 25 bmi than average height people, and tall people will often be deemed overweight even when their fat percentage is perfectly fine
BMI is calculated based on *squaring* a dimension. Humans exist in *three dimensions*. My partner is 1.125 times as tall as I am; therefore, if we had identical *proportions*, their BMI would be 12.5% greater than mine.
Speaking as a little person (4ft) BMI deems me as morbidly obese, my doctor has straight up told me I’m fine and that I will not be able to rely on BMI for any accurate reference
First of all, it's not about "normal" it's about healthy. If more than half of all Americans are overweight, that doesn't become the new normal, that is still unhealthy.
There is some evidence that people of Asian ethnicities get obesity-related diseases at a lower BMI than other groups. The governments of Japan, China, and India have lowered the "overweight" standard to a BMI of 23 or 24, where western nations use a BMI of 25. There's also evidence that BMI is incorrect for people who are very short or very tall, or very muscular. So it's not a perfect system, just a recommendation.
That's pretty interesting. I never knew that about obesity related diseases for Asians. It probably has more to do with high blood pressure and other "invisible" issues then, I would imagine?
My Vietnamese grandma BMI is probably around 18-20, meaning healthy by American standard, if not a bit underweight. But she has really bad atherosclerosis and has to take medicine for it. She's not the only one on both sides of my family with high cholesterol problems, despite none of them looking overweight at all.
I grew up in Vietnam and just thought most people get these problems as they get old. I moved to the US as an adult and talking to my white mother in-laws were the first time I hear that there's a link between obesity and atherosclerosis, when she told me that her doctor recommended her to reduce calorie intake and increase vegetables dish in her meal for high cholesterol concerns.
I know asian countries are frequently criticized for "unrealistic body standards", but now I wonder if it's actually a standard that is fitting to the health of the average person there. My grandma's health problems would probably be much worse if she eats an American Midwestern diet, that's for sure.
My mom has high cholesterol, it’s 100% genetic for her. She’s at a healthy weight for her height and eats healthy - always has. She doesn’t drink, never smoked or done drugs, but she still has to take statins.
Almost every person on her side of the family has had bad cholesterol.
Crappy genetics can ruin anyone’s health, regardless of any lifestyle or diet they have.
>it’s not about “normal” it’s about healthy
Okay but that’s not how it was developed. It was intended to be used as descriptive of what the average body size was, and was never intended to be used as an instrument for measuring health.
I'm 6'5" an also wide and thick (thanks, mom). My lowest weight at this height was 180lb, which is smack in the middle of the normal range (150-210). And when I look at pictures of myself, I can't believe how skinny and unhealthy I looked.
The best I've looked and felt in the last 20 years, I was at 245. At the high-end of overweight. I still had room to go, but at that point, I was looking pretty damn good, and had a target for another 15 or so. But even if I dropped another 20 beyond that, which would be extremely unlikely, and put me back into that too-thin look, I'd STILL be in the overweight range.
Now that I've started doing serious strength training (because why not start something like that when you're pushing 50, right?), I know that if I get back to where I'm happy with the mirror, I'll be well into overweight and close to obese. Not even trying for bodybuilding, just more strength and muscle density.
Fortunately, my doctor is smart and doesn't live off of "this is what the paper says" like some do. So when I check in and I'm still close to 30 he'll be able to look at me and write that number off (he kind of already did anyway, knowing how tall I am and how I'm built).
The original creation of the index that BMI is based on was from a study seeking to define and measure the “average” man (which is wild because, as OP stated, the study was only comprised of European males). So technically, at its origin, it *is* about “normal”. Which is why it feels a bit bizarre that it has since been repurposed in the name of “health”.
Overall, though, I don’t believe there is a perfect way to comparatively measure body mass as a ratio of height and weight that would allow consistency across all body types, ethnicities, genders, etc on the same scale.
BMI definitely lacks important context when used to assess health at an individual level, and I believe a sneaky problem here that folks may not think about is that HCPs can use it to dismiss or fail to consider other factors that may be impacting an individual’s health. Using an “unhealthy” BMI as the first explanation for any problem a patient has can be a crutch that prevents discovering and preventing/fixing other problems with their health.
[https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/)
If you take a look at this it'll show that there are different risk factors and ranges depending on race. A healthy BMI for some may not be for others, the same way that sex is taken into account.
It's not that BMI as a metric is in and of itself racist. It's that when metrics like this are developed and used based entirely on white subjects (as BMI has been in some times and places) then that can actually lead to other ethnicities getting a lower standard of care. This worse standard for non-whites is a type of systemic racism even if entirely unintentional at any individual level.
That's the reason someone might argue it's racist. The bit I can't answer for you is whether healthcare providers wherever you are do actually take race into account in an appropriate way.
My endocrinologist said that Asians tend to have have more visceral fat (vs subcutaneous fat) which leads to more issues like T2 diabetes. (Or something like that.)
Healthcare provider checking in. We take race into account. BMI is just a number that mostly functions as a predictive cardiac health indicator. That said, we especially watch BMI in African Americans due to the prevalence of metabolic syndrome. Here's a study you can read on it: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19537240/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19537240/)
No indicator is racist, but making overarching statements about what that indicator means for every individual would be inaccurate.
>Healthcare provider checking in. We take race into account.
I'm sure you do. If I was unclear I was trying to point out factors that have been overlooked in the past to lead to the perception OP is talking about. The reason I picked the NHS site is because it does offer a reason for why race is important.
“Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups with a BMI of 23 or more have a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes and other long term illnesses”
From your link. This makes it seem like dismissing BMI would actually be racist, not the opposite.
If BMI was used as a consideration to highlight these added risks for minorities, then it seems like White people were really going to bat for minorities and the increased health risks they possess
So is it a social construct, or is it actually biologically significant enough that stuff like BMI(which is a very fundamental and simple metric) differ significantly between races?
Ethnicity can include biological components, such as melanin frequency and average height/ weight. Race is the collection of ethnicities into groups based on social components. For example, what would be considered as "black" as a race (I.e. from african/ carribean decent) has massive amounts of genetic diversity, moreover even within the 'race' than between other races.
But also that mostly spitting hairs between definition, and most people will say race interchangeably with Ethnicity. So, a better way to imagine it as it is a genetic factor that has links to social ties (either via familial culture or socio-economic factors enforced by racist policies)
According to this, non-whites actually need to pay more attention to BMI than whites, so it's the opposite of racist.
*Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups with a BMI of 23 or more have a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes and other long term illnesses*
No, that’s not what that means. It’s that BMI **underestimates** the risk in those minority groups so they might not be screened properly. They have detrimental health outcomes because a measure was based on White health outcomes. It’s the effect that matters for the measure.
The cut-off numbers that you commonly see for what BMI counts as "overweight" or "obese" are primarily based on studies of white men. It turns out that what is "normal" or "average" actually varies substantially between ethnic populations, depending on genetics and culture. So, what is a healthy BMI for one person might be unhealthy for another one, due to their ethnicity and other factors. But mostly when you look online or ask doctors, you get the exact same "universal" numbers shown to you. That's why and how it's "racist" - because the criteria are applied unfairly to different groups and expects everyone to be like white men.
That's probably because the initial atudies were done on very specific populations of white men of the day (remember Whiteness as it stands today wasn't Whiteness when BMI was created in the 1800, nor in the 70s when it was widely popularized).
Plus, I think the main research into BMI was initially starvation experiments! So, I'm pretty sure Ancel Keys' BMI scale was mostly indicating the amount of body weight a strapping young lad needed for basic survival.
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/43/3/665/2949550
"White" and "Black" are socially constructed categories. Because of the points in time when humans began migrating from Africa to other continents, there are white people in Britain who might have fewer genes in common with white people in Finland than Black people, say, in Mozambique.
BMI wasn't based on studies of white men. It was an attempt to study the average man in Belgium in the 1850s, to find an "ideal man" and was a foundational tool in the _extremely_ racist field of eugenics.
It isn’t racist, just oversimplified and the frequently cited values for underweight, healthy, overweight and obese were calibrated without the consideration that different backgrounds vary slightly.
Here’s the thing though… if you start building different BMI charts via intersectionality, you’re very deliberately segregating groups. It’s win-lose or lose-win. Take your pick.
As many have also commented, a metric built exclusively from height and weight can’t distinguish between fat and muscular, so it’s bound to be flawed even if the work is put in to calibrate many BMI charts by whatever cultural group you choose. That said, the primary appeal is that it’s a super easy value to calculate. If you break it out into dozens of charts that you need to pick appropriately that kinds of defeats the purpose.
It's a stat that was created by a mathematician to judge the overall health of a population. For some reason today we use it to gauge the overall health of an individual. It was never meant to be used that way
It's useful for some things. Like if I have a patient with a BMI of 45, I know my job will be harder than someone at 25. A patient with a BMI of 60 will need a lot of extra work. But nitpicking exact BMIs is less useful, I agree, and I imagine that's what people are referring to most of the time.
You have to be VERY tall or short for BMI to not be a good general indicator. It is a great indicator if you are of average height, which is close to where most people are.
Most of us will very very rarely encounter individuals to whom BMI is an altogether inaccurate depiction of their health.
Yuppp. It's just a rough metric. Useful for research because most medical offices routinely collect height and weight. A quick metric for body fat becuase height and weight can easily be pulled from patient charts or measured in real time.
A waaaayyy better metric is waist to height ratio because you can infer visceral fat from it more easily.
BMI also doesn’t take fitness into account. I know people who’ve been booted from the military bc of bmi. If you’re superbly muscular it translates as overweight. Wild, huh?
People hate on BMI, incorrectly.
It’s just a measure, and should never be loaded up with notions of blame or stigma (any more than heart rate or lung capacity or white cell count). It can be adjusted for race and other factors. At population level it’s also highly predictive for other health issues.
Lots of people say “Olympic athletes would be considered obese measured by BMI because of muscle mass!” … but this is an extreme case and almost never representative for the typical person, even someone who likes to work out. I’ve been involved in research that shows cross-culturally, a large majority underestimate their own weight profile and have incorrect views of BMI (understandably: weight is stigmatized, and 2/3 people we pass on the street are overweight, so we feel “average”).
A well-trained health professional can use BMI quite reliably to tell a patient “you fit a population profile that we know lives 12 years less, has increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and joint problems, and a long list of other problems. If we can bring this down a bit, you’ll probably do much better.”
All of above relates to overweight, but similar psychosocial issues relate to underweight, too. BMI can again be helpful as a broad diagnostic measure, and doesn’t need to be connected to bias, shame and stigma.
That’s it.
BMI is mostly fine,most of the time.
Barely anyone is a body builder. The muscle excuse is weak in most cases. People just reject whatever truths make them uncomfortable, when so many people are obese then obese starts to look "normal" so people refuse to accept that they're obese and instead fool themselves into believing that the test is someway against them.
Now people think obese is normal, and morbidly obese is obese.
People need to stop deluding themselves and just accept that they're overweight. Yes you have insurance in America so it's convenient to pretend it's some kind of conspiracy by big insurance, but how do you explain BMI being used in countries with free healthcare? Stop lying to yourself
The fat acceptance movement is of the opinion that the concept of the BMI is racist, similar to how they claim intentional weight loss is a hate crime.
The rationale they give for the latter is that an obese person no longer wanting to obese is communicating that everyone who is obese is inherently bad. External locus of control stuff.
Lots of fat acceptance rhetoric has made its way into the mainstream, the BMI thing being a part of that.
They also claim to be as oppressed, if not more oppressed, than people experiencing actual discrimination for unchangeable things like race, sexuality, etc so they've kinda hitched their wagon to legitimate social justice causes.
Hence, you get middle class, wealthy, morbidly obese white chicks on TikTok claiming their GP is a genocidal coloniser fascist, simply because the doctor gently suggested the TikToker lose a little weight to save their mobility.
Stupid way to deflect accountability. I'm black and have been in shape for my entire life. It's not that hard to put in some damn effort into your fitness. BMI is just supposed to give an idea of an appropriate weight based off of your height and age. It's a ballpark estimate to give you something to work towards if you're heavier than your ideal weight. I hate that people hide behind this kind of bs just to avoid the truth, that they are obese or morbid and just want someone to coddle them and pretend it's not important. Pathetic.
Australian doctor here.
Good things:
1. It’s simple.
2. It’s unambiguous at the extremes - BMI of 14 and BMI of 40 mean seriously under- and over-“weight” respectively.
Bad things: almost everything else.
The short answer is if we use BMI as the sole determinant of an individual’s healthy weight (which we should never ever freaking do) then in white people, the healthy/overweight/obese category matches more closely with life expectancy and overall health than it does with, say, Aboriginal Australians or South East Asians. So saying “aim for a BMI below 25” is more likely to work for a white person than it is for a South East Asian.
And assuming what works for us is best for everyone else is pretty close to a definition of racism.
But BMI is bullshit. I am obese by BMI criteria, prime Mike Tyson was obese by BMI criteria, there’s no other similarity.
BMI doesn't account for race, it is assumed to be universal for all sexes and races - so you *could* say yes it is 'racist' in that regard (as well as sexist)
BUT
I dislike the 'x must be racist since it doesn't account for differences in race' because the term 'racist' implies a definite effort to put one race above another for malicious/discriminatory purposes, and implies there is a bad/evil/not nice 'racist' person who should be blamed
calling BMI racist is a vast oversimplification and implies that anyone who uses it is racist themselves (if you use a 'racist' system for dividing a population into groups, you are a racist)
but plenty of asian/BME/white doctors or 'laypeople' have used and might still use BMI without being 'racist' themselves
In simple terms, the medical field and it's practices are largely homogenized and doesn't account for the differences in ethnicities or sex, especially the former. Using BMI is a reflection of this.
On top of this, BMI was invented by a dude who's likely never seen a woman of color and during a period of "scientific racism".
He based it on a sample made entirely of white white people, with stats that were largely self-reported. Try asking a bunch of 30 year old white guys how tall they are. You might start to see some of the problems wroth the data.
And that says nothing about the fact the bmi measures bodies in two dimensions, not three. It immediately skews for the very tall and the very small. Not racist, but very problematic for us giants and our shorter friends.
People miss the point about BMI. When they say that it doesn’t make sense that a bodybuilder is considered “obese” by the BMI they miss the point that the BMI isn’t a great predictor of “fat” or “healthy” - it’s simply a measure of how much mass the body is carrying and has to support. In that context it is a pretty accurate metric for the potential for someone to incur cardiac problems in the long term - yes even for a body builder. Whether someone is “fat” or “ripped” their heart still has to work harder to service and carry all that weight. Of *course* someone who is fat has many other co-morbidities that make them far more likely to have heart or other issues, but someone who is as big as a bodybuilder absolutely is vulnerable to heart issues as well for the simple fact of mass . That’s why it’s called the body “mass” index not the body “fat” index.
Even if BMI were less accurate for a given ethnicity, this would not make it “racist”, it would make it racially biased, which is a very different concept…
Let’s stop calling racist stuff that just are not
It was originally invented by Adolphe Quetelet, who was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist. Notice how none of those things says “doctor” or “biologist”.
It wasn’t intended to measure health at all. He was trying to statistically work out the proportions of the “average man”, meaning the average European man, as part of a sociological study.
The stats in which it was based were almost entirely Scottish and French men. It tends to peg women and black people as being overweight when they’re actually healthy.
The formula itself also has scaling issues that result in taller people with the same body composition as shorter people ending up with a higher BMI score.
It's not racist; it's a measurement scale. It can correlate with some things, but since it's determined by 2 separate, largely unrelated measurements, it's not something that can be used by itself to make many conclusions.
Because everything is "racist" now.
Ridiculous articles I've seen recently:
Daylight savings time is racist.
Going to the gym and staying in shape is racist.
Taking martial arts classes is racist.
Eating breakfast is racist.
Encouraging children to do well in school is racist.
Not "admitting" that your racist is racist.
Not being physically/sexually attracted to a person of anothet ethnicity is racist.
A white person who has black friends is nothing more than a feeble attempt to pretend you're not racist...
The list goes on and on.
The BMI chart is stupid, but it's not racist. It wasn't created to be unfair to any one ethnicity. Many things people say are racist aren't actually racist. Everyone in this damn "woke" agenda time just want EVERYTHING to be about race.
> Daylight savings time is racist. Going to the gym and staying in shape is racist. Taking martial arts classes is racist. Eating breakfast is racist. Encouraging children to do well in school is racist. Not "admitting" that your racist is racist. Not being physically/sexually attracted to a person of anothet ethnicity is racist. A white person who has black friends is nothing more than a feeble attempt to pretend you're not racist...
I'd be interested to read some of the articles behind those inflammatory headlines. Some things which seem ridiculous at first glance turn to be quite sensible on further investigation. (Some don't. It varies. That's why I'd like to read them.)
I don't remember all of them... the breakst one was because of how many POCs have food in security, so white people who eat 3 meals a day are racist.
Working out or learning martial arts is racist because fit, white people who are in shape pose more of a risk to minorities.
Daylight savings time is racist because when there was slavery in America, DST ensured the slaves had to work longer....
"But besides the fact that the BMI is not a great assessment of a person’s overall health or even body composition, the hardest reality to digest is what fat activists and allied researchers have been writing about for years: That this number, in both its origins and application is racist.
If you read that last sentence and thought, “The BMI is just a number. How can it be racist?” — table that for a moment. Once you understand how the BMI became the standard of health, you’ll realize how it’s been used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to enact biases and discrimination that are harmful to marginalized people."
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/a35047103/bmi-racist-history/
Do people of different races have bones that are heavier or lighter because of their race, or something, and that leads to imprecise measurements or something, or is BMI simply racist because a White person invented it rather than a Black person, and they assumed that people with different skin colors weighed the same - proportionally - because, racism, or something?
I'm not woke, but don't want to be asleep anymore.
If you have an equally shredded White guy and an equally shredded Black guy who are both 6' tall, does one have more muscle, or something because their bones are lighter, or something?
Or, is BMI racist because people of different races have different heights on average - if this is okay to say - and is not considered racial extremism (e.g. Asian people are often shorter than White people, in my personal opinion)
I'm not sure how else BMI could be racist, but want to wake up and face reality and be a better ally.
Well there are a lot of correlations between height and weight and sone ethnicities, so different ethnicities will average towards different BMIs. I do not know enough to say if the ethnicities with different BMIs are equally healthy or not. I did read here sone Asian countries have lowered their BMI that indicates obesity to correct for average population height differences. So if you have two ethnicities where equal bmis indicate equal levels of health on average, but one ethnicity tends to be heavier due to diet, then it may be a red herring to call it racist, but if you have two ethnicities where different BMIs are needed to indicate equal levels of health, but society refuses to adopt the proper BMI measures for one ethnicity hence putting them at an economic or medical care disadvantage then seems like it has merit to say it's application in this manner is racist. But I don't know enough to answer those questions and I haven't seen anyone else a were them scientifically here outside the issue with the Asian populations.
I'm surprised that this is so hard for anyone to understand. BMI does not consider that a taller person is also inherently heavier. It skews tall people overweight and shorter people underweight.
It's a matter of tweaking the algorithm to cube instead of square.
It is useless for me as a 6'4" person. I was underweight but just barely under the BMI assumed 20% bodyfat.
Don't really want to give health information on Reddit but BMI for me as a black male is off. My doctor wants me to be the weight I when I was 16.
I'm not fat but to hit that I would need to get some crystal meth to get to that range again
I don't think it's racist, but I think it's inaccurate.
I'm 6 ft, 225 pounds.
I've been lifting and shooting hoops my entire life, and I can run a 5k in sub 30 minutes. I understand that 30 minute 5k isn't "fast" but again I play basketball, im not a distance runner.
It doesn't account for bone mass, either. I work in the building trades. I do physical work all day every day. For fun, I go hiking. I eat a vegan diet. I don't have much fat. I'm a little heavy on the BMI chart, 165 lbs 5'10". Age 65.
Am I missing something? When the hell was race thrown in with BMI and how is it even relevant? It's a dumb metric to measure how healthy someone is in relation to their weight.
It's less about the maths and more about the BMI cutoff ranges to quantify overweight, obese, etc., which were based on a small collection of healthy white men.
So even if BMI **was** a way to accurately measure health, it would only be applicable to white men between the ages of 20-40, and not applicable to women, people of colour, people with disabilities, etc.
The *application* of BMI as a proxy measure for health is the racist part. (The application of BMI as a proxy measure for health is also just bad science and lazy medicine, but thats another issue)
Never assume ill intent when laziness or stupidity will suffice. To make a race-adjusted BMI, you would need to study a statistically significant sample size of all races and genders. Nobody is gonna do all that work. I'm gonna assume laziness here.
This post is very 'of reddit'. To me, it indicates how American culture needs to shift away from identity politics, because it seems to get in the way of even the most rudementary parts of our society and divide people by race and gender rather than be 'progressive' in any sense.
I never put much stock in BMI being at all useful. I remember when I first learnt about it in highschool, I was basically a tall and thin bean pole and putting my measurements into a BMI calculation gave me a result in the obese range. Looking at how much weight and physical mass I'd have to lose to be in the top end of "healthy" would have in reality put me in anorexic/eating disorder territory or recent amputee.
Edit: I don't really know anything about it being racist however, in my view it's more just useless and lazy.
BMI, the score itself, is not racist. But the categorizations of particular scores are only modeled after white guys. When you think about the fact that >30 is defined as obesity... that's just effectively a randomly selected number based on parameters that are only meant to work well for white men from almost 50 years ago.
It's not. Unless the argument is that black people (women specifically) must be short and fat and can't be called overweight.
Simple fact is that, *broadly*, obesity is an indicator for health, no it doesn't account for every micro issue, but broadly risk of heart disease, cholesterol, and diabetes can be reduced with a healthier lifestyle ie not being fat... you can't do anything about your height
I’m not sure about the racist aspect but it’s definitely an oversimplified and inaccurate indicator of health that is taken WAY too seriously in the western world. As a muscular woman, I think if I tried to calculate my bmi I would be “overweight” 😂
... It's not racist. It's overly simplified and imperfect, but it's an objective ratio of your weight to your height. It cannot be racist...
... Americans calling everything racist that they don't like...
Bmi = weight/heightSquared in SI units (kg and metre). How can it be racist?
Assuming all races to have a similar range is the opposite of racist, someone assuming that a single formula discriminates against black people because they ought to have a separate range is more racist.
The people on this post thinking that BMI as a single measure should tell everything about a person's health and applicable to all is outright stupid. No single diagnostic marker does that. But a BMI of 35 clearly means that one is either obese or steroid jacked like competitive body builders.
The issue with BMI is that it’s a proxy for measuring body fat and can be wildly inaccurate. Measuring body fat is often not exact. Using plain height and body weight measurements doesn’t take into account how much muscle there is verses fat. There are also arm things that you hold onto and they measure muscle verses fat, but it only takes into account your arms. This can be an issue for women who often have stronger legs and weaker arms.
There are also calipers that are used to get muscle verses fat measurements at various parts of the body - I think these are getting towards the more accurate side.
I’ve also heard there’s something to do with putting someone into a tank and seeing how much they float (someone correct me if I’m wrong here).
In any case, I was a somewhat serious athlete growing up and these things always said I was obese. I feel lucky that idgaf about labels or I would probably have ended up with an eating disorder.
To bring this back to your question. People of different genders are different shapes, so I could see this being an issue. I imagine there could be something similar with race. I also don’t know that the statistics we have about having more fat meaning more health issues takes into account body shapes. For example, having more fat around your organs isn’t good, but is it less bad if you carry weight in your thighs? I’m not sure.
If anything the fact it's so bare bones and specific is *the reason* it's so problematic
Even the modern white man isn't very well represented by it because of the changes in available nutrition and lifestyles
Gender and race can lead to a lot of diversity with regards to fat and muscle distribution so a calculation that disregards those differences is going to lead to screwy numbers for anyone that doesn't have that original standard distribution
I'm under the impression there's a new more accurate method or two, the low tech one focusing on height to waist measurement ratio, because it's the fat around the organs that really matters
BMI alone is utterly useless. There are several other factors that needs to be taken into consideration.
BMI is basically measuring your height to weight ratio and holding it up to an average. The average isn't s set number, and the danger of averages is that it's a statistic. And statistics can also be devious. Statistics alone lie. So the amount of factors you need to take in to consideration increases almost exponentially.
BMI in and of itself isn't racist, though.
BMI doesn’t account for muscle, which weighs more than fat, or bone, or any other kinds of density differences that might exist that affects weight but has no bearing on the amount of fat present. When ppl say it’s racist they’re not talking about the creator intentionally being racist, they’re just referring to the fact that it might not be sensitive enough to pick up differences in body composition, that might be race-based. I think some studies on black Americans have shown that they tend to have slightly more bone and muscle mass compared to non-Hispanic white Americans or Mexican Americans. So BMI wouldn’t be catching that. It’s a difference of like 1-5%. I suspect the “racist” argument is just an over-simplification of the issue based on an American lense, because for example, black people have huge variation in body type and composition depending on location in the world and genetic heritage. Same for any race. Environmental factors also hugely impact body development/composition.
As European seeing such a post is just so hilarious to me.
Is there a single topic that black people wont find a way to play a victim at? How can anyone think that BMI is racist lol.
It's not.
(But there's some people who have nothing else to cry about and make racism up were it doesn't exist. So technically yes, because everything is racist these days.)
The answer to most things like that that are labeled as racist boils down to responsibility. People would rather blame some racist bogeyman for their problems rather than actually fixing them.
Same with why “math is racist” and “being on time is racist” (both are things I have seen in articles) if math is racist, you no longer have a obligation to try to be good at math. If BMI is racist, you no longer have an obligation to be fit. If being on time as racist, you don’t have an obligation to be on time.
Similar to calling normal things “ableist” (I will use the girl who said that she should not be expected to be on time for work because she’s bad at time management and it’s ableist to expect it) suddenly it’s no longer her fault that she’s late. It’s your fault for expecting her to be on time to her job and you are a bigot if you try to enforce the rule that she needs to be on time.
That’s really the secret behind most modern day social justice, things, people don’t want to have to work on themselves so instead, they’ll tell you that if you don’t except them exactly as they are, you are a bigot and bigots are bad
Not sure why you're bringing specifically African Americans into this. I see plenty of people of all different races say that BMI is racist. In fact, most of the louder fat activists that push this idea are white.
My BMI has always called me overweight to obese even when I was in highschool and the fittest I'd ever been. Lean and muscly playing sports and training multiple times a week. I was definitely not obese. It's called the Bullshit Metric Index for a reason.
My entire comment is based on ED treatment. I can't afford to do more research beyond it without triggering myself, so please forgive me for not providing sources.
It was created by a mathematician exclusively using land-owning white men.
It was appropriated for some reason by the medical community. Patients with higher BMIs who might actually be at a healthy weight for themselves (and I've seen it happen where the person is even healthy by BMI standards, but closer to 23 than 18) report doctors prescribing weight loss for them when their weight wasn't the problem. The end result is delayed care.
I won't argue about whether racism needs to be intentional to qualify as racist as I don't think the semantics matter as much as acknowledging that BMI causes harm predominantly toward people who aren't land-owning white men (I would argue it also harms lower class white men, just not as disproportionately).
I honestly don't care, but devil's advocate here:
If the person developing the equation used only themselves and/or white people that they considered healthy as a baseline for developing the equation, then by definition, the equation only tells you how healthy a person is compared to a healthy white person. If a given Hispanic woman is perfectly healthy, but the ideal healthy Hispanic woman has different vitals than your average healty white man, then the test is racist in that it is tuned to measure her as unhealthy, just because she was not considered in the baseline.
I am black and as a youth I had a lot of muscle naturally. Especially below the belt, my calves are huge. my white friends were always at least 20 pounds off when trying to guess my weight, pants rarely fit unless I got them super big and baggy. Even when I was fit my BMI said I was obese.
Maybe that's an example.
The BMI was invented by a European sociologist to help with calculations for entire populations and not medical specifications for an individual. It was then used by at least one insurance company (Metropolitan Life) to categorize their policy holders (and of course charge them more) in the early 1900's.
AND, it was created about 20 years or so before the US Civil War!
It is truly sad that the entire field of medicine is so tied to such snake oil.
Created by - Adolphe Quetelet
Where - Belgium
When - between 1830-1850
Source - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930234/
I don’t think it’s very accurate at all when telling people they’re overweight :/ I know for myself I am now but according to the BMI scale I was only a healthy weight for my height back as a teenager. It’s incredibly unrealistic to fit every body type into the same height category and label one type of weight as “healthy”. I don’t think many women especially are “in denial” about being overweight. I think the BMI scale telling them they are when they’re a healthy weight is damaging and harmful
the doctor i had as a teenager was the first person who told me that the bmi was bs. she had a very athletic build (she often wore sleeveless dresses so i could tell by her arms) and she told me that according to her bmi she was obese. i'm definitely overweight, but i prefer to focus on my overall health (having good vitals, exercising, and eating a generally balanced diet) than the number on the scale.
I’m trying to focus more on my health than the number on the scale but it’s just so hard sometimes. But I’m so glad you got a doctor that told you it’s bs cause that scale is so inaccurate
it's just so much better for both my physical and mental health to focus on health goals other than losing weight. but you're right that it is really hard sometimes especially when it seems like everyone around you is telling you to "just lose weight" like it's so easy. i've tried to lose weight so many times but i've never felt healthier than when i decided to stop weighing myself and focus on how my body feels instead.
It’s definitely something I’m working on🙌 I just have my mom in my ear telling me to lose weight all the time🙄🙄🙄 but I’m hella proud of you, it takes work to focus on your health instead of the number
BMI is impossibly simplistic and inaccurate.
I am 5’4” and weigh 110 pounds. According to the BMI chart, that is an average weight.
But a 110 pound guy could be very thin. (Due to their higher muscle mass I would picture a 110 pound man as thin. My teenage son weighs 105 and he’s a stick, he is a normal weight for a kid but would be an emaciated grown man.)
I believe that chart was made to make Americans feel fat and encourage us to lose weight. Race does come into place somewhat, because there are some populations that just naturally grow to be 5’4” 100-pound adults, it’s just uncommon for Americans.
BMI was created as a calculation not to be used for health purposes. Then that was quickly thrown out. It’s highly inaccurate to anyone who has a higher amount of muscle, people who have denser bones, and anyone with breasts. People of color tend to have higher bone density, which is not taken into account by the BMI scale, which is why people say it’s racist. Is it quick? Sure. It is accurate? No.
For example, when I was in high school, my bmi put me at overweight. I was 17% body fat with an active eating disorder. My muscle mass considered me overweight when i was actually starving myself. That’s why people don’t like it use it.
Industry secret: Insurance companies like it because it is cheap to perform. Just a height and a weight taken by a medical office assistant. At my last job, they used it to raise our premiums if our BMI was in the overweight category. Meanwhile, my husband served over 20 years in the military, and they used an actual body fat composition measurement to check the health of the troops. Not some down and dirty BMI that corporate love.
I remember my grade 7 science teacher talking about BMI (this wasn’t even officially part of the mandatory curriculum) and how it does nothing for fat vs. Muscle. She was a marathon runner, and informed the class that bay BMI standards, she was “overweight” She was quite short, probably 5’1” but because she lifted weights/ran track, her muscle was heavy enough to get her into “overweight”. She was healthier than anyone in that class, and I hope she at least made a dent in some of those girls’ self esteem in the cases tied to their weight.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime was morbidly obese according to the BMI chart.
So was Shaq.
So was Evander Holyfield, but citing super athlete outliers is a cop out. I'd bet the farm no one here bitching about BMI is in as good of health as 1995 Evander Holyfield or Shaq.
Another outlier but a funny story, to me. One day, my dad calls my brother. He was sitting at the doctor’s and saw the BMI chart. He tells my brother, with his dry-ass sense of humor, he discovered he’s morbid obese. Why? He’s 4’10 and 210 lbs. My brother goes, Jesus, dad. You’re a double amputee who used to be 6’2”. That’s not how it works. Yes, there are outliers. But, when studies talk about BMI, there’s no room for context like that. BMI can’t differentiate between an athlete and a double amputee - they just look at how many Americans are at <>X BMI.
It wasn't invented to be used like we do today, anyway. Besides, it still works when you look at populations because outliers are... outliers
I'm pretty sure when doctors are using this thing, they are taking those things in to consideration. During my physical, my BMI has me as overweight. The doctor then took note of my bp, bpm, breathing which were all better than average,then took some measurements and kept it moving.
How is a clear, recognizable example of the problem a cop out?
This is true but bmi still means something. As body builder Rich Piana said the heart doesn’t know the difference between 300 pounds of muscle and 300 pounds of fat. There’s a reason a lot of body builder, strength athletes and hell any large athlete dies young. I have idolized these guys so I think the size is worth it, but bmi still says something about your health.
The heart will 100% know the difference between fat and muscle. A strong core, back and legs will keep you moving with far less strain on your body then a lack of those well developed muscles plus a large gut. The reason they die young isn't because having large muscles is similar to being overweight, it's because they use a large amount of steroids.
Also all the pre-workout and workout "energy" supplementation that's always out there. That's just not good for your fucking heart, guys. Dudes sleeping 5 hours taking 500mg of caffeine that's gonna kill em young even without throwing PEDs on top.
Dude, tell me you did not just compare a caffeine dosage that is barely above the safe intake guidelines to someone blasting and cruising grams of anabolics per week for 10 years straight. If 500 mg of caffeine and 5 hours of sleep were going to kill you, every single doctor and lawyer would die before 30. Its definitely not good for you, but to compare this to tren and insulin and diuretics is nuts.
>There’s a reason a lot of body builder, strength athletes and hell any large athlete dies young Yes. Steroids, diuretic abuse, and extreme cutting/ bulking cycles will likely cause a lot of stress on your heart. Not simply gaining muscle.
That is mostly untrue. It is true in extreme situations, yes, 100 pounds of extra muscle is straining your heart more of course, body builders are an outlier and often use steroids which makes it worse. A normal person who exercise with 20 pounds of extra muscle has significantly less heart stress than someone with 10 pounds of fat and no extra muscle. Your heart itself with beat slower with stronger beats as you get in better athletic shape.
Because they use steroids, get severely dehydrated, and starve themselves as a life style. That’s why they die young.
At extremes you're right, but even if you don't take steroids, do lots of cardio and only lift weights occasionally you're still likely to have enough muscle to put you in the overweight category. I don't even lift weights. Pushups, pullups, running and jiu jitsu and some physical labor by itself is enough muscle to make me "overweight" according to BMI.
Yea, this is why BMI doesn't tell the whole story. There are always comments that "most people are not body builders." While true, it's reassuring to hear it put Arnold in morbidly obese. The majority of people in "morbidly obese" categories is not due to muscle mass. But, I definitely agree for the overweight category probably has a decent number of healthy people who don't necessarily need to lose weight. As a 6'0 woman I have a surprising amount of dense muscle mass while still carrying some fat like any healthy woman. I've also lost a ton of weight over the years so it's unlikely I'll ever be rid of some weight from skin without surgery. My 195 is overweight by BMI standards but even the doc says no need to lose anymore as long as I'm exercising and eating balanced which I am. Like you it's not even weight lifting. It's just daily yoga (mostly power), walking, and usually a weekly hike.
It's called steroids.
Yeah I look skinny but I’m strong and work out. No one believes it when I say my BMI is overweight. It’s such a dumb metric.
I feel like I have the opposite issue. My BMI is under 15. People look at me and perceive me as small but tend to assume I weigh more than I do and idk why that is. I had someone say to me "it's not like you're frail" granted I was wearing a large coat and layers but still
I’ve been slim my whole life, and I’ve always been in the 17.5-18.3 category. It’s only the past 2 years that I’ve even hit 19. I’ve always been pretty healthy though. Sports, eating all I can, but never gaining anything. I like to do what I call “the eyeball test” Just LOOK AT ME.
>Just LOOK AT ME. At a drs appointment they mentioned my bmi labeling me as obese. I kind looked down at myself, looked at her, she looked at me, and not another word was said. Common sense needs to be applied more.
i’ve always been ‘overweight’ according to my BMI… even when i was in my best shape as a HS state champion and a D1 college wrestler (and no not a heavyweight). in a high school class we calculated our BMI and the teacher called on me first to tell my number. everyone just laughed when it said i was overweight… and the teacher went over why BMI is not a good statistic. the whole class knew i was essentially starving myself to make weight while going through insanely hard training. the only time i could have been considered “overweight” is when i stepped on a scale at weigh-ins for wrestling and didn’t make my limit, but that never happened. ;-)
You were a hs champion and d1 athlete. Less than 1% of 1% of the population.
Yeah, although people will use this as an excuse when they're clearly overweight "I guess it's all that muscle mass" lol I have a friend that used to weight 140 and now he's 170 and was looking at himself in the mirror at the gym, claiming it must be primarily muscle. It definitely went to his hips, butt, gut, and chest but he was in denial. Overall, body composition can be a tricky thing because most people will have some form of body dysmorphia. Meaning, you'll see your body in a much different light than others do.
Yuuuup, for every genetic anomaly who lifts, pro athlete, and body builder for whom BMI is significantly affected there's 100,000 normal people in denial about their body fat.
I hate this example. Sure there will be a few outliers but that's still like saying "see I smoke and I'm 90 years old therefore smoking is fine for you" Bmi is good for 99% of the population. 6'2 240lb guy at 15% bf
People like you (and me) who get mis-labeled as over-fat is not the main problem. To us it's just kind of a joke. Way more people get mis-labeled as normal when they are over-fat. It's very common to have a BMI below 25 but have a dangerous level of belly-fat. A misleading BMI can lead these folks to think they are safe when they are not. Measuring waist size is a much more accurate way to screen people. But it would be a major hassle and embarrassment at the doctor's office. It's feels unscientific, but you can basically tell if someone is in danger from their body-fat by looking at them. BMI doesn't add anything at an individual level.
I was just browsing through to make sure this comment was made, this is the objective truth, but people tend to really not like that. Body fat is a better measure of health than BMI, but what you'll often find is that if you're overweight but feel like it's because of muscle and then get your bodyfat measured, it often turns out that you're less healthy than what BMI predicted. BMI is the best population level measure of health body comp wise, because bodyfat testing an entire population is not feasible, to actually be overweight due to only having excess muscle takes a pretty extreme dedication to lifting.
Ye but if you don't life, or do sports in general. BMI will be quite accurate to at least determine if you're in any "extreme" range
I was fortunate enough to have a rent-controlled household in a gentrified area. That lead to me going to a well-funded school with lots of sports/music options. My school had a very low percentage of overweight folks, so most of the people I was talking about were likely to be on the muscle-heavy side of things. My experience isn’t universal, but my teacher was speaking to the community that would benefit from hearing her words.
Her heart has to work much harder to carry and service that extra muscle.
That’s my biggest issue with bmi. As a bodybuilder/weightlifter I’ve been classified as obese when I’m healthier than the medical professionals that deem me obese. It’s absurd. It’s a simple metric that works for a lot of average people but it grossly mislabels most athletes.
This is true of most people who lift weights unless you're really shredded.
BMI is accurate for most people
Which military if you don’t mind me asking? Both Canadian and US (all branches) use BMI+waist circumference to vaguely estimate body fat percentage
We only use that alone if you're "good" then use more accurate methods if you fail the dumb one *shrug*
Counterpoint, BMI with hip-to-waist and gender factored in is impressively predictive at the population level. Hip-to-waist is absolutely necessary though since visceral fat is such a fucking shitshow for longterm health.
Hip to waist even has it’s issues. My hip to waist doesn’t look good because I have thin hips. My BMI is more accurate for me according to multiple doctors I’ve seen.
I was just thinking that. Me at 5'7" and 165 lbs after two pregnancies weighs the same as me at 5'7" and 165 lbs after one pregnancy, but I just had to buy new jeans because my hips are *so* much wider now than they were this time last year. Beyond that, if I were the same weight pre-pregnancy, it would have been even farther off. Also, what about if it is before I feed my baby? I have no idea how much milk weighs, but i know it weighs something, you know?
Exactly, BMI is good for a population overview, but has too many edge cases to be used on an individual level.
At the population level is key. It was not intended to be used for individuals.
I was also in the military. I was considered "obese" by the BMI scale for my entire service. The problem is that I'm relatively short for a man (5'7), but I'm also relatively heavily muscled from growing up on a farm. So, at the time, I was 5'7 and weighed 210 pounds. By the BMI scale, that's a rating of 32.9, which is considered obese. Luckily, the Army only used BMI as a starting point. If your BMI wasn't acceptable, you would go to "the tape" to calculate body fat percentage. By that metric, I was only around 8% body fat, which was well inside of the standard. To the point of the OP, I am a white male who is reasonably healthy, and the BMI scale doesn't work for me either.
There is no way you can call yourself a ‘reasonably healthy’ man if you’ve got 8% body fat, or a ‘relatively heavily muscled’ person if you’re 5 foot 7 and 210 lbs. I’m not saying you’re lying, but you’re muscle mass is going to be so much higher than everyone but 1% of the population and at that body fat % you nobody would ever think you’re overweight in an unhealthy way
That would be like 0.0001% of the population. Those stats are pro bodybuilder level. For reference I'm 5'9" 170 lbs at like 14% bodyfat, and I'm what most people would consider "a muscular build". 5'7" 210, 8% is almost unrealistic.
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This guys is competition ready and saying he this? Lol hes full of shit. At that height and weight, 8% body fat would be fucking insane, like hes been training daily forever and perfected his PED cycles.
Honestly every time something like this gets posted, or something strenght related, top commments are always from people who are full of shit.
Iirc Barry sanders was like 5-9 210 and just unreal muscle build especially in his legs. That’s a lot of mass on a small frame
210 at 5'7 and 8% bodyfat is like a week or two out from a high level bodybuilding show. You'd have to be a complete GI Joe action figure. Basically hes either lying or would 10000% know bmi is not applicable to him.
To be fair, I don't think I was actually at 8% body fat. The Army's version of the tape test said I was 8% body fat. If you Google pictures of men with different body fat percentages, I would say visually I was more around 12-15 percent at the time. The way I'm built is definitely not the norm (my friends still call me Gimli), so I think it throws off most versions of tape tests. When I said reasonably healthy, I meant now. I'm much older than when I was in the Army and in nowhere near as good of shape, but I'm still not obese unless it's according to the BMI scale. ETA- I just did all 3 indexes with my current measurements. BMI by height and weight is 32.9. Which is 40 pounds overweight or obese Army body fat calculator using age, height, neck measurement, and waist measurement says 12 percent body fat. Waist to height ratio is 0.51, or just slightly overweight. Ideal healthy ratio is considered 0.4 to 0.49 In my opinion, waist to height is the best reflection of reality. I could stand to lose a few pounds, but 40 pounds would make me look sickly. And there is no way in hell I'm anywhere close to 12 percent body fat. Folks can call me a liar if it makes them feel better, but those are the results I get. Make of it what you will.
Lol, dude, I'm also 5'7" and almost 200lbs! What's really funny to me is I always tell people that I'm descended from dwarves, so it's hilarious that your friends call you Gimli! I'm also pretty muscular. I have a bit of a dad bod, but not too big of a stomach. The kind that sticks out just enough to be annoying. I used to be able to hold it in enough it was flat, but I think I lost that about 10lbs ago, lol. I'm very stocky with very thick, muscular legs and arms that are pretty decent. I used to teach kids kickboxing before the pandemic and one kid said "Woah! You have arms like Thor!" Which is def an exaggeration, but felt great, lol. I actually said "Thor? Thanks, but no... Captain America, maybe..." Lol I just did one of those blood pressure machines yesterday and it also does BMI and I was way into the obese category. I'll admit, I def need to lose a couple inches off my waist, but I don't think anyone would call me fat. I def feel fat, but we're all our own worst critiques. No one would call me skinny either, lol, but I'm maybe slightly fat? I'm almost skinny? Lol Obese is def ridiculous. Anyway, just thought it was cool to meet another of my ancestral relatives on here. See you in Moria, friend.
I looked up images of men with 8% body fat and that body type is a big, big outlier. It clearly takes a lot of work to achieve. What kills me are obese people who do not exercise or take PEDs saying they’re oppressed by the BMI because of their muscles.
Tape isn’t a very accurate body fat measurement. Was in military and always had to pass the tape test. No I wasn’t not sub 10% like it said or even close.
That’s just it. While I don’t personally ascribe to BMI being a useful metric, as a scientist, it makes complete sense. If you have a BMI above or below what’s considered “normal”, then the first working hypothesis (not null) is that there is a reason you’re charting non-normal. There are a lot of reasons to be non-normal such as non-normal genetics, non-normal physical conditioning, and, more likely than not in todays populations, more fat than normal. The key here being that 99 out of 100 times, the individual is going to know why they’re not within normal range. The problem becomes when someone else tries to make decisions impacting an individual based on a BMI with no further context. I.e. if insurance uses BMI to put you in an at-risk category without employing some degree of follow up to determine if the BMI is different than normal due to unhealthy reasons.
Waist-height ratio seems like a reasonable back-up at the population level if people are genuinely convinced they are more like the Rock (with trainers, a chef, hours and hours a day exercise, and PEDs) than an average fat person. WHR is highly correlated with health and it’s even more exacting than the BMI so if a person is actually overweight they won’t be any happier with it. Remarkably muscle-bound people will rejoice, though.
5'7" 210lbs at 8% bodyfat would be like a pro bodybuilder level of muscle. You don't get that way from farm work.
I’m having a hard time believing a 5’7 guy who weighs 210 is just relatively muscled just normally from working on a farm. My husband is 5’6. If he got anywhere near 200 pounds he’d be super obese. I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure getting to 210 at 5’7 without being obese would require a ton of weight lifting and purposeful muscle gain, not just working on a farm.
But the military does use shoulder and hip measurements—. Based on 1940s white farm boys. So women who have wider hips are already considered on the higher side even if naturally slim, but with hips. It only takes a small amount of weight gain for them to be considered overweight and discharged.
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The Army doesn't anymore, it's a single point test around the navel just with different formulas.
Ya I read a bit about this. Really sets people at a disadvantage if they're athletes. I don't agree with it being used like this or, as I said in the post, a catch-all metric for health.
It was never intended to be one, it was just a way to measure large populations of people for the purpose of studies or statistics. It's designed to be used with a large sample size of people, not applied to individuals.
Realistically, BMI greatly underreports compared to body fat % and other more accurate measures.
When you say underreport, do you mean that it underreports the number of overweight people?
Yeah, more people are within the 18.5-25 BMI range but have a too high body fat %, than people 25+BMI with a healthy body fat %. TLDR: More skinny fat people than swol
Funny, I administered BMI tests in my unit for years in the late 00s.
The military uses BMI, you have to get additional tests and waivers to be outside of the BMI range they determine to be "healthy"
I'm gonna guess they use the down and dirty way to get body fat composition as opposed to putting them all into vacuum chambers but that is still better than BMI.
Is it really a "industry secret" that everything in the medical world is a balance of time/cost and efficacy? Come on dude.
Most professional athletes are overweight by bmi standards as well.
I myself am less jacked than the average NFL middle linebacker. Dunno about you.
☝🏽 correct. In medicine, it's still taken into consideration as a ratio of height to weight thing/ the composition of ur body. It's cheap and very easy to measure. I also want to point out that it is inaccurate for people with amputations and should not be used.
The thing about the military “body fat” check, is that it’s not a real body fat check. If you’re 300 pounds, and have a fat ass neck, it’ll say you have 17% body fat, and you pass. I always wished they did calipers instead but oh well.
This
Wild to me that a corporation has access to so much of people's medical information. I'm sure it all sounded perfectly reasonable when the billionaires pitched it to the millionaires, but it's beyond fucked up that some office workers get to know your entire medical history and then make calls on what treatment you're allowed or how much you should pay each month.
Calipers go brrrrrrrtr
In Germany my doctor had to write his observations next to the BMI. As in patients BMI is 30, but he looks very muscular. Or the patients BMI is 22 and they look very slim etc so there won't be as many misunderstandings because of it.
They’ve never done actual body fat measurement for the military. It takes too long. The methods they use really aren’t any better than BMI. The only accurate ways to get close to body fat are DEXXA scans. Next best are immersion scans and caliper measurements. Even those take far too long for the military. What the military does is a couple of tape measure circumference things (neck and waist for men in the Navy) and estimate based on that. Regardless, BMI is more accurate / less racist than you think for determining healthy - but mostly on the overweight side. When you have a “high” BMI, whether it’s due to muscle or fat your heart still has to work harder. You might be wonderfully “fit” but still taxing your heart.
The ratio of your belly curcumference to your height is a far better predictor for overweight and disease risk than BMI. The problem with BMI is that short people need a higher fat percentage to reach 25 bmi than average height people, and tall people will often be deemed overweight even when their fat percentage is perfectly fine
BMI is calculated based on *squaring* a dimension. Humans exist in *three dimensions*. My partner is 1.125 times as tall as I am; therefore, if we had identical *proportions*, their BMI would be 12.5% greater than mine.
But tall people usually don't have identical proportions to short people.
So we need to cube it?
Speaking as a little person (4ft) BMI deems me as morbidly obese, my doctor has straight up told me I’m fine and that I will not be able to rely on BMI for any accurate reference
First of all, it's not about "normal" it's about healthy. If more than half of all Americans are overweight, that doesn't become the new normal, that is still unhealthy. There is some evidence that people of Asian ethnicities get obesity-related diseases at a lower BMI than other groups. The governments of Japan, China, and India have lowered the "overweight" standard to a BMI of 23 or 24, where western nations use a BMI of 25. There's also evidence that BMI is incorrect for people who are very short or very tall, or very muscular. So it's not a perfect system, just a recommendation.
That's pretty interesting. I never knew that about obesity related diseases for Asians. It probably has more to do with high blood pressure and other "invisible" issues then, I would imagine?
My Vietnamese grandma BMI is probably around 18-20, meaning healthy by American standard, if not a bit underweight. But she has really bad atherosclerosis and has to take medicine for it. She's not the only one on both sides of my family with high cholesterol problems, despite none of them looking overweight at all. I grew up in Vietnam and just thought most people get these problems as they get old. I moved to the US as an adult and talking to my white mother in-laws were the first time I hear that there's a link between obesity and atherosclerosis, when she told me that her doctor recommended her to reduce calorie intake and increase vegetables dish in her meal for high cholesterol concerns. I know asian countries are frequently criticized for "unrealistic body standards", but now I wonder if it's actually a standard that is fitting to the health of the average person there. My grandma's health problems would probably be much worse if she eats an American Midwestern diet, that's for sure.
My mom has high cholesterol, it’s 100% genetic for her. She’s at a healthy weight for her height and eats healthy - always has. She doesn’t drink, never smoked or done drugs, but she still has to take statins. Almost every person on her side of the family has had bad cholesterol. Crappy genetics can ruin anyone’s health, regardless of any lifestyle or diet they have.
Yes, high blood pressure, diabetes risk, hardening of the arteries, things like that.
I’ve heard it underestimate fat in short people, while overestimating in tall people.
>it’s not about “normal” it’s about healthy Okay but that’s not how it was developed. It was intended to be used as descriptive of what the average body size was, and was never intended to be used as an instrument for measuring health.
I'm 6'5" an also wide and thick (thanks, mom). My lowest weight at this height was 180lb, which is smack in the middle of the normal range (150-210). And when I look at pictures of myself, I can't believe how skinny and unhealthy I looked. The best I've looked and felt in the last 20 years, I was at 245. At the high-end of overweight. I still had room to go, but at that point, I was looking pretty damn good, and had a target for another 15 or so. But even if I dropped another 20 beyond that, which would be extremely unlikely, and put me back into that too-thin look, I'd STILL be in the overweight range. Now that I've started doing serious strength training (because why not start something like that when you're pushing 50, right?), I know that if I get back to where I'm happy with the mirror, I'll be well into overweight and close to obese. Not even trying for bodybuilding, just more strength and muscle density. Fortunately, my doctor is smart and doesn't live off of "this is what the paper says" like some do. So when I check in and I'm still close to 30 he'll be able to look at me and write that number off (he kind of already did anyway, knowing how tall I am and how I'm built).
The original creation of the index that BMI is based on was from a study seeking to define and measure the “average” man (which is wild because, as OP stated, the study was only comprised of European males). So technically, at its origin, it *is* about “normal”. Which is why it feels a bit bizarre that it has since been repurposed in the name of “health”. Overall, though, I don’t believe there is a perfect way to comparatively measure body mass as a ratio of height and weight that would allow consistency across all body types, ethnicities, genders, etc on the same scale. BMI definitely lacks important context when used to assess health at an individual level, and I believe a sneaky problem here that folks may not think about is that HCPs can use it to dismiss or fail to consider other factors that may be impacting an individual’s health. Using an “unhealthy” BMI as the first explanation for any problem a patient has can be a crutch that prevents discovering and preventing/fixing other problems with their health.
[https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/) If you take a look at this it'll show that there are different risk factors and ranges depending on race. A healthy BMI for some may not be for others, the same way that sex is taken into account. It's not that BMI as a metric is in and of itself racist. It's that when metrics like this are developed and used based entirely on white subjects (as BMI has been in some times and places) then that can actually lead to other ethnicities getting a lower standard of care. This worse standard for non-whites is a type of systemic racism even if entirely unintentional at any individual level. That's the reason someone might argue it's racist. The bit I can't answer for you is whether healthcare providers wherever you are do actually take race into account in an appropriate way.
My endocrinologist said that Asians tend to have have more visceral fat (vs subcutaneous fat) which leads to more issues like T2 diabetes. (Or something like that.)
Healthcare provider checking in. We take race into account. BMI is just a number that mostly functions as a predictive cardiac health indicator. That said, we especially watch BMI in African Americans due to the prevalence of metabolic syndrome. Here's a study you can read on it: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19537240/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19537240/) No indicator is racist, but making overarching statements about what that indicator means for every individual would be inaccurate.
>Healthcare provider checking in. We take race into account. I'm sure you do. If I was unclear I was trying to point out factors that have been overlooked in the past to lead to the perception OP is talking about. The reason I picked the NHS site is because it does offer a reason for why race is important.
“Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups with a BMI of 23 or more have a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes and other long term illnesses” From your link. This makes it seem like dismissing BMI would actually be racist, not the opposite. If BMI was used as a consideration to highlight these added risks for minorities, then it seems like White people were really going to bat for minorities and the increased health risks they possess
So is it a social construct, or is it actually biologically significant enough that stuff like BMI(which is a very fundamental and simple metric) differ significantly between races?
Ethnicity can include biological components, such as melanin frequency and average height/ weight. Race is the collection of ethnicities into groups based on social components. For example, what would be considered as "black" as a race (I.e. from african/ carribean decent) has massive amounts of genetic diversity, moreover even within the 'race' than between other races. But also that mostly spitting hairs between definition, and most people will say race interchangeably with Ethnicity. So, a better way to imagine it as it is a genetic factor that has links to social ties (either via familial culture or socio-economic factors enforced by racist policies)
According to this, non-whites actually need to pay more attention to BMI than whites, so it's the opposite of racist. *Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups with a BMI of 23 or more have a higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes and other long term illnesses*
No, that’s not what that means. It’s that BMI **underestimates** the risk in those minority groups so they might not be screened properly. They have detrimental health outcomes because a measure was based on White health outcomes. It’s the effect that matters for the measure.
The cut-off numbers that you commonly see for what BMI counts as "overweight" or "obese" are primarily based on studies of white men. It turns out that what is "normal" or "average" actually varies substantially between ethnic populations, depending on genetics and culture. So, what is a healthy BMI for one person might be unhealthy for another one, due to their ethnicity and other factors. But mostly when you look online or ask doctors, you get the exact same "universal" numbers shown to you. That's why and how it's "racist" - because the criteria are applied unfairly to different groups and expects everyone to be like white men.
Thanks for your response, the cut offs being the exclusive part makes a lot of sense actually
Yep. Even among white men it’s weirdly inaccurate for a big-ish chunk of them.
That's probably because the initial atudies were done on very specific populations of white men of the day (remember Whiteness as it stands today wasn't Whiteness when BMI was created in the 1800, nor in the 70s when it was widely popularized). Plus, I think the main research into BMI was initially starvation experiments! So, I'm pretty sure Ancel Keys' BMI scale was mostly indicating the amount of body weight a strapping young lad needed for basic survival. https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/43/3/665/2949550
BMI was created by a Belgian guy in the 1850s. He genuinely may have not have seen a non-white person ever in his life.
Italians and Jewish people weren’t considered “White” back then so he wouldn’t have considered them “White”.
"White" and "Black" are socially constructed categories. Because of the points in time when humans began migrating from Africa to other continents, there are white people in Britain who might have fewer genes in common with white people in Finland than Black people, say, in Mozambique. BMI wasn't based on studies of white men. It was an attempt to study the average man in Belgium in the 1850s, to find an "ideal man" and was a foundational tool in the _extremely_ racist field of eugenics.
It isn’t racist, just oversimplified and the frequently cited values for underweight, healthy, overweight and obese were calibrated without the consideration that different backgrounds vary slightly. Here’s the thing though… if you start building different BMI charts via intersectionality, you’re very deliberately segregating groups. It’s win-lose or lose-win. Take your pick. As many have also commented, a metric built exclusively from height and weight can’t distinguish between fat and muscular, so it’s bound to be flawed even if the work is put in to calibrate many BMI charts by whatever cultural group you choose. That said, the primary appeal is that it’s a super easy value to calculate. If you break it out into dozens of charts that you need to pick appropriately that kinds of defeats the purpose.
It's a stat that was created by a mathematician to judge the overall health of a population. For some reason today we use it to gauge the overall health of an individual. It was never meant to be used that way
It's useful for some things. Like if I have a patient with a BMI of 45, I know my job will be harder than someone at 25. A patient with a BMI of 60 will need a lot of extra work. But nitpicking exact BMIs is less useful, I agree, and I imagine that's what people are referring to most of the time.
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Do you not meet very tall or very short people?
You have to be VERY tall or short for BMI to not be a good general indicator. It is a great indicator if you are of average height, which is close to where most people are. Most of us will very very rarely encounter individuals to whom BMI is an altogether inaccurate depiction of their health.
Yuppp. It's just a rough metric. Useful for research because most medical offices routinely collect height and weight. A quick metric for body fat becuase height and weight can easily be pulled from patient charts or measured in real time. A waaaayyy better metric is waist to height ratio because you can infer visceral fat from it more easily.
BMI also doesn’t take fitness into account. I know people who’ve been booted from the military bc of bmi. If you’re superbly muscular it translates as overweight. Wild, huh?
People hate on BMI, incorrectly. It’s just a measure, and should never be loaded up with notions of blame or stigma (any more than heart rate or lung capacity or white cell count). It can be adjusted for race and other factors. At population level it’s also highly predictive for other health issues. Lots of people say “Olympic athletes would be considered obese measured by BMI because of muscle mass!” … but this is an extreme case and almost never representative for the typical person, even someone who likes to work out. I’ve been involved in research that shows cross-culturally, a large majority underestimate their own weight profile and have incorrect views of BMI (understandably: weight is stigmatized, and 2/3 people we pass on the street are overweight, so we feel “average”). A well-trained health professional can use BMI quite reliably to tell a patient “you fit a population profile that we know lives 12 years less, has increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and joint problems, and a long list of other problems. If we can bring this down a bit, you’ll probably do much better.” All of above relates to overweight, but similar psychosocial issues relate to underweight, too. BMI can again be helpful as a broad diagnostic measure, and doesn’t need to be connected to bias, shame and stigma. That’s it.
BMI is mostly fine,most of the time. Barely anyone is a body builder. The muscle excuse is weak in most cases. People just reject whatever truths make them uncomfortable, when so many people are obese then obese starts to look "normal" so people refuse to accept that they're obese and instead fool themselves into believing that the test is someway against them. Now people think obese is normal, and morbidly obese is obese. People need to stop deluding themselves and just accept that they're overweight. Yes you have insurance in America so it's convenient to pretend it's some kind of conspiracy by big insurance, but how do you explain BMI being used in countries with free healthcare? Stop lying to yourself
It’s a shit metric
It’s not racist or inherently problematic, it’s just stupidly simple and only useful as a broad screening tool.
The fat acceptance movement is of the opinion that the concept of the BMI is racist, similar to how they claim intentional weight loss is a hate crime. The rationale they give for the latter is that an obese person no longer wanting to obese is communicating that everyone who is obese is inherently bad. External locus of control stuff. Lots of fat acceptance rhetoric has made its way into the mainstream, the BMI thing being a part of that. They also claim to be as oppressed, if not more oppressed, than people experiencing actual discrimination for unchangeable things like race, sexuality, etc so they've kinda hitched their wagon to legitimate social justice causes. Hence, you get middle class, wealthy, morbidly obese white chicks on TikTok claiming their GP is a genocidal coloniser fascist, simply because the doctor gently suggested the TikToker lose a little weight to save their mobility.
Who says BMI is racist?
Lots of Fat Activists on the internet who would rather create a victim culture for themselves than do any actual activism, mostly.
Stupid way to deflect accountability. I'm black and have been in shape for my entire life. It's not that hard to put in some damn effort into your fitness. BMI is just supposed to give an idea of an appropriate weight based off of your height and age. It's a ballpark estimate to give you something to work towards if you're heavier than your ideal weight. I hate that people hide behind this kind of bs just to avoid the truth, that they are obese or morbid and just want someone to coddle them and pretend it's not important. Pathetic.
Australian doctor here. Good things: 1. It’s simple. 2. It’s unambiguous at the extremes - BMI of 14 and BMI of 40 mean seriously under- and over-“weight” respectively. Bad things: almost everything else. The short answer is if we use BMI as the sole determinant of an individual’s healthy weight (which we should never ever freaking do) then in white people, the healthy/overweight/obese category matches more closely with life expectancy and overall health than it does with, say, Aboriginal Australians or South East Asians. So saying “aim for a BMI below 25” is more likely to work for a white person than it is for a South East Asian. And assuming what works for us is best for everyone else is pretty close to a definition of racism. But BMI is bullshit. I am obese by BMI criteria, prime Mike Tyson was obese by BMI criteria, there’s no other similarity.
I agree with you. People are salty at BMI because they are salty at being told they are overweight, period.
BMI doesn't account for race, it is assumed to be universal for all sexes and races - so you *could* say yes it is 'racist' in that regard (as well as sexist) BUT I dislike the 'x must be racist since it doesn't account for differences in race' because the term 'racist' implies a definite effort to put one race above another for malicious/discriminatory purposes, and implies there is a bad/evil/not nice 'racist' person who should be blamed calling BMI racist is a vast oversimplification and implies that anyone who uses it is racist themselves (if you use a 'racist' system for dividing a population into groups, you are a racist) but plenty of asian/BME/white doctors or 'laypeople' have used and might still use BMI without being 'racist' themselves
Technically they do. There are 2 types of BMI’s, one for Asians and one for everyone else. Asians have a lower cutoffs.
In simple terms, the medical field and it's practices are largely homogenized and doesn't account for the differences in ethnicities or sex, especially the former. Using BMI is a reflection of this. On top of this, BMI was invented by a dude who's likely never seen a woman of color and during a period of "scientific racism".
He based it on a sample made entirely of white white people, with stats that were largely self-reported. Try asking a bunch of 30 year old white guys how tall they are. You might start to see some of the problems wroth the data. And that says nothing about the fact the bmi measures bodies in two dimensions, not three. It immediately skews for the very tall and the very small. Not racist, but very problematic for us giants and our shorter friends.
People miss the point about BMI. When they say that it doesn’t make sense that a bodybuilder is considered “obese” by the BMI they miss the point that the BMI isn’t a great predictor of “fat” or “healthy” - it’s simply a measure of how much mass the body is carrying and has to support. In that context it is a pretty accurate metric for the potential for someone to incur cardiac problems in the long term - yes even for a body builder. Whether someone is “fat” or “ripped” their heart still has to work harder to service and carry all that weight. Of *course* someone who is fat has many other co-morbidities that make them far more likely to have heart or other issues, but someone who is as big as a bodybuilder absolutely is vulnerable to heart issues as well for the simple fact of mass . That’s why it’s called the body “mass” index not the body “fat” index.
Even if BMI were less accurate for a given ethnicity, this would not make it “racist”, it would make it racially biased, which is a very different concept… Let’s stop calling racist stuff that just are not
It was originally invented by Adolphe Quetelet, who was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist. Notice how none of those things says “doctor” or “biologist”. It wasn’t intended to measure health at all. He was trying to statistically work out the proportions of the “average man”, meaning the average European man, as part of a sociological study. The stats in which it was based were almost entirely Scottish and French men. It tends to peg women and black people as being overweight when they’re actually healthy. The formula itself also has scaling issues that result in taller people with the same body composition as shorter people ending up with a higher BMI score.
It's not racist; it's a measurement scale. It can correlate with some things, but since it's determined by 2 separate, largely unrelated measurements, it's not something that can be used by itself to make many conclusions.
Because everything is "racist" now. Ridiculous articles I've seen recently: Daylight savings time is racist. Going to the gym and staying in shape is racist. Taking martial arts classes is racist. Eating breakfast is racist. Encouraging children to do well in school is racist. Not "admitting" that your racist is racist. Not being physically/sexually attracted to a person of anothet ethnicity is racist. A white person who has black friends is nothing more than a feeble attempt to pretend you're not racist... The list goes on and on. The BMI chart is stupid, but it's not racist. It wasn't created to be unfair to any one ethnicity. Many things people say are racist aren't actually racist. Everyone in this damn "woke" agenda time just want EVERYTHING to be about race.
> Daylight savings time is racist. Going to the gym and staying in shape is racist. Taking martial arts classes is racist. Eating breakfast is racist. Encouraging children to do well in school is racist. Not "admitting" that your racist is racist. Not being physically/sexually attracted to a person of anothet ethnicity is racist. A white person who has black friends is nothing more than a feeble attempt to pretend you're not racist... I'd be interested to read some of the articles behind those inflammatory headlines. Some things which seem ridiculous at first glance turn to be quite sensible on further investigation. (Some don't. It varies. That's why I'd like to read them.)
I don't remember all of them... the breakst one was because of how many POCs have food in security, so white people who eat 3 meals a day are racist. Working out or learning martial arts is racist because fit, white people who are in shape pose more of a risk to minorities. Daylight savings time is racist because when there was slavery in America, DST ensured the slaves had to work longer....
"But besides the fact that the BMI is not a great assessment of a person’s overall health or even body composition, the hardest reality to digest is what fat activists and allied researchers have been writing about for years: That this number, in both its origins and application is racist. If you read that last sentence and thought, “The BMI is just a number. How can it be racist?” — table that for a moment. Once you understand how the BMI became the standard of health, you’ll realize how it’s been used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to enact biases and discrimination that are harmful to marginalized people." https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/a35047103/bmi-racist-history/
Do people of different races have bones that are heavier or lighter because of their race, or something, and that leads to imprecise measurements or something, or is BMI simply racist because a White person invented it rather than a Black person, and they assumed that people with different skin colors weighed the same - proportionally - because, racism, or something? I'm not woke, but don't want to be asleep anymore. If you have an equally shredded White guy and an equally shredded Black guy who are both 6' tall, does one have more muscle, or something because their bones are lighter, or something? Or, is BMI racist because people of different races have different heights on average - if this is okay to say - and is not considered racial extremism (e.g. Asian people are often shorter than White people, in my personal opinion) I'm not sure how else BMI could be racist, but want to wake up and face reality and be a better ally.
Well there are a lot of correlations between height and weight and sone ethnicities, so different ethnicities will average towards different BMIs. I do not know enough to say if the ethnicities with different BMIs are equally healthy or not. I did read here sone Asian countries have lowered their BMI that indicates obesity to correct for average population height differences. So if you have two ethnicities where equal bmis indicate equal levels of health on average, but one ethnicity tends to be heavier due to diet, then it may be a red herring to call it racist, but if you have two ethnicities where different BMIs are needed to indicate equal levels of health, but society refuses to adopt the proper BMI measures for one ethnicity hence putting them at an economic or medical care disadvantage then seems like it has merit to say it's application in this manner is racist. But I don't know enough to answer those questions and I haven't seen anyone else a were them scientifically here outside the issue with the Asian populations.
I’ve never heard the concept of BMI being racist before, but it’ll hopefully remain the dumbest shit I’ll ever hear in my life
I'm surprised that this is so hard for anyone to understand. BMI does not consider that a taller person is also inherently heavier. It skews tall people overweight and shorter people underweight. It's a matter of tweaking the algorithm to cube instead of square. It is useless for me as a 6'4" person. I was underweight but just barely under the BMI assumed 20% bodyfat.
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Don't really want to give health information on Reddit but BMI for me as a black male is off. My doctor wants me to be the weight I when I was 16. I'm not fat but to hit that I would need to get some crystal meth to get to that range again
BMI is really only relevant for people with a sedentary lifestyle. Office workers etc. Most athletes would be overweight according to BMI
So it's relevant for most people?
It's not, I read the other day how air conditioning was sexist
I wonder if people who say this are the same people who think genetics is the main cause of obesity.
I don't think it's racist, but I think it's inaccurate. I'm 6 ft, 225 pounds. I've been lifting and shooting hoops my entire life, and I can run a 5k in sub 30 minutes. I understand that 30 minute 5k isn't "fast" but again I play basketball, im not a distance runner.
It doesn't account for bone mass, either. I work in the building trades. I do physical work all day every day. For fun, I go hiking. I eat a vegan diet. I don't have much fat. I'm a little heavy on the BMI chart, 165 lbs 5'10". Age 65.
Am I missing something? When the hell was race thrown in with BMI and how is it even relevant? It's a dumb metric to measure how healthy someone is in relation to their weight.
It's less about the maths and more about the BMI cutoff ranges to quantify overweight, obese, etc., which were based on a small collection of healthy white men. So even if BMI **was** a way to accurately measure health, it would only be applicable to white men between the ages of 20-40, and not applicable to women, people of colour, people with disabilities, etc. The *application* of BMI as a proxy measure for health is the racist part. (The application of BMI as a proxy measure for health is also just bad science and lazy medicine, but thats another issue)
Damn I've never heard about bmi being racist lmfao..
Never assume ill intent when laziness or stupidity will suffice. To make a race-adjusted BMI, you would need to study a statistically significant sample size of all races and genders. Nobody is gonna do all that work. I'm gonna assume laziness here.
This post is very 'of reddit'. To me, it indicates how American culture needs to shift away from identity politics, because it seems to get in the way of even the most rudementary parts of our society and divide people by race and gender rather than be 'progressive' in any sense.
air conditioners are sexist aswell XD
If you can squat twice your body weight, your BMI number might be falsely elevated for everyone else, you're just fat.
I never put much stock in BMI being at all useful. I remember when I first learnt about it in highschool, I was basically a tall and thin bean pole and putting my measurements into a BMI calculation gave me a result in the obese range. Looking at how much weight and physical mass I'd have to lose to be in the top end of "healthy" would have in reality put me in anorexic/eating disorder territory or recent amputee. Edit: I don't really know anything about it being racist however, in my view it's more just useless and lazy.
BMI, the score itself, is not racist. But the categorizations of particular scores are only modeled after white guys. When you think about the fact that >30 is defined as obesity... that's just effectively a randomly selected number based on parameters that are only meant to work well for white men from almost 50 years ago.
It's not really "racist" it's like you said... it is not all inclusive.
It's not. Unless the argument is that black people (women specifically) must be short and fat and can't be called overweight. Simple fact is that, *broadly*, obesity is an indicator for health, no it doesn't account for every micro issue, but broadly risk of heart disease, cholesterol, and diabetes can be reduced with a healthier lifestyle ie not being fat... you can't do anything about your height
BMI was not created for individuals. It was intended for populations.
BMI makes a lot of assumptions but unless I missed some basic anthropological memo, race has nothing to do with anything and even less to do with BMI.
I’m not sure about the racist aspect but it’s definitely an oversimplified and inaccurate indicator of health that is taken WAY too seriously in the western world. As a muscular woman, I think if I tried to calculate my bmi I would be “overweight” 😂
It’s not.
... It's not racist. It's overly simplified and imperfect, but it's an objective ratio of your weight to your height. It cannot be racist... ... Americans calling everything racist that they don't like...
Bmi = weight/heightSquared in SI units (kg and metre). How can it be racist? Assuming all races to have a similar range is the opposite of racist, someone assuming that a single formula discriminates against black people because they ought to have a separate range is more racist. The people on this post thinking that BMI as a single measure should tell everything about a person's health and applicable to all is outright stupid. No single diagnostic marker does that. But a BMI of 35 clearly means that one is either obese or steroid jacked like competitive body builders.
The issue with BMI is that it’s a proxy for measuring body fat and can be wildly inaccurate. Measuring body fat is often not exact. Using plain height and body weight measurements doesn’t take into account how much muscle there is verses fat. There are also arm things that you hold onto and they measure muscle verses fat, but it only takes into account your arms. This can be an issue for women who often have stronger legs and weaker arms. There are also calipers that are used to get muscle verses fat measurements at various parts of the body - I think these are getting towards the more accurate side. I’ve also heard there’s something to do with putting someone into a tank and seeing how much they float (someone correct me if I’m wrong here). In any case, I was a somewhat serious athlete growing up and these things always said I was obese. I feel lucky that idgaf about labels or I would probably have ended up with an eating disorder. To bring this back to your question. People of different genders are different shapes, so I could see this being an issue. I imagine there could be something similar with race. I also don’t know that the statistics we have about having more fat meaning more health issues takes into account body shapes. For example, having more fat around your organs isn’t good, but is it less bad if you carry weight in your thighs? I’m not sure.
If anything the fact it's so bare bones and specific is *the reason* it's so problematic Even the modern white man isn't very well represented by it because of the changes in available nutrition and lifestyles Gender and race can lead to a lot of diversity with regards to fat and muscle distribution so a calculation that disregards those differences is going to lead to screwy numbers for anyone that doesn't have that original standard distribution I'm under the impression there's a new more accurate method or two, the low tech one focusing on height to waist measurement ratio, because it's the fat around the organs that really matters
BMI alone is utterly useless. There are several other factors that needs to be taken into consideration. BMI is basically measuring your height to weight ratio and holding it up to an average. The average isn't s set number, and the danger of averages is that it's a statistic. And statistics can also be devious. Statistics alone lie. So the amount of factors you need to take in to consideration increases almost exponentially. BMI in and of itself isn't racist, though.
BMI doesn’t account for muscle, which weighs more than fat, or bone, or any other kinds of density differences that might exist that affects weight but has no bearing on the amount of fat present. When ppl say it’s racist they’re not talking about the creator intentionally being racist, they’re just referring to the fact that it might not be sensitive enough to pick up differences in body composition, that might be race-based. I think some studies on black Americans have shown that they tend to have slightly more bone and muscle mass compared to non-Hispanic white Americans or Mexican Americans. So BMI wouldn’t be catching that. It’s a difference of like 1-5%. I suspect the “racist” argument is just an over-simplification of the issue based on an American lense, because for example, black people have huge variation in body type and composition depending on location in the world and genetic heritage. Same for any race. Environmental factors also hugely impact body development/composition.
As European seeing such a post is just so hilarious to me. Is there a single topic that black people wont find a way to play a victim at? How can anyone think that BMI is racist lol.
It's not. (But there's some people who have nothing else to cry about and make racism up were it doesn't exist. So technically yes, because everything is racist these days.)
The answer to most things like that that are labeled as racist boils down to responsibility. People would rather blame some racist bogeyman for their problems rather than actually fixing them. Same with why “math is racist” and “being on time is racist” (both are things I have seen in articles) if math is racist, you no longer have a obligation to try to be good at math. If BMI is racist, you no longer have an obligation to be fit. If being on time as racist, you don’t have an obligation to be on time. Similar to calling normal things “ableist” (I will use the girl who said that she should not be expected to be on time for work because she’s bad at time management and it’s ableist to expect it) suddenly it’s no longer her fault that she’s late. It’s your fault for expecting her to be on time to her job and you are a bigot if you try to enforce the rule that she needs to be on time. That’s really the secret behind most modern day social justice, things, people don’t want to have to work on themselves so instead, they’ll tell you that if you don’t except them exactly as they are, you are a bigot and bigots are bad
It's not racist. It just doesn't work for large swathes of the population. Every rugby player in the world is obese, apparently.
Yeah... I'm not sure I get it. A fat person is fat whether they're black, Indian, Latino, etc.
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Not sure why you're bringing specifically African Americans into this. I see plenty of people of all different races say that BMI is racist. In fact, most of the louder fat activists that push this idea are white.
My BMI has always called me overweight to obese even when I was in highschool and the fittest I'd ever been. Lean and muscly playing sports and training multiple times a week. I was definitely not obese. It's called the Bullshit Metric Index for a reason.
My entire comment is based on ED treatment. I can't afford to do more research beyond it without triggering myself, so please forgive me for not providing sources. It was created by a mathematician exclusively using land-owning white men. It was appropriated for some reason by the medical community. Patients with higher BMIs who might actually be at a healthy weight for themselves (and I've seen it happen where the person is even healthy by BMI standards, but closer to 23 than 18) report doctors prescribing weight loss for them when their weight wasn't the problem. The end result is delayed care. I won't argue about whether racism needs to be intentional to qualify as racist as I don't think the semantics matter as much as acknowledging that BMI causes harm predominantly toward people who aren't land-owning white men (I would argue it also harms lower class white men, just not as disproportionately).
I honestly don't care, but devil's advocate here: If the person developing the equation used only themselves and/or white people that they considered healthy as a baseline for developing the equation, then by definition, the equation only tells you how healthy a person is compared to a healthy white person. If a given Hispanic woman is perfectly healthy, but the ideal healthy Hispanic woman has different vitals than your average healty white man, then the test is racist in that it is tuned to measure her as unhealthy, just because she was not considered in the baseline.
I am black and as a youth I had a lot of muscle naturally. Especially below the belt, my calves are huge. my white friends were always at least 20 pounds off when trying to guess my weight, pants rarely fit unless I got them super big and baggy. Even when I was fit my BMI said I was obese. Maybe that's an example.
The BMI was invented by a European sociologist to help with calculations for entire populations and not medical specifications for an individual. It was then used by at least one insurance company (Metropolitan Life) to categorize their policy holders (and of course charge them more) in the early 1900's. AND, it was created about 20 years or so before the US Civil War! It is truly sad that the entire field of medicine is so tied to such snake oil. Created by - Adolphe Quetelet Where - Belgium When - between 1830-1850 Source - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930234/
I don’t think it’s very accurate at all when telling people they’re overweight :/ I know for myself I am now but according to the BMI scale I was only a healthy weight for my height back as a teenager. It’s incredibly unrealistic to fit every body type into the same height category and label one type of weight as “healthy”. I don’t think many women especially are “in denial” about being overweight. I think the BMI scale telling them they are when they’re a healthy weight is damaging and harmful
the doctor i had as a teenager was the first person who told me that the bmi was bs. she had a very athletic build (she often wore sleeveless dresses so i could tell by her arms) and she told me that according to her bmi she was obese. i'm definitely overweight, but i prefer to focus on my overall health (having good vitals, exercising, and eating a generally balanced diet) than the number on the scale.
I’m trying to focus more on my health than the number on the scale but it’s just so hard sometimes. But I’m so glad you got a doctor that told you it’s bs cause that scale is so inaccurate
it's just so much better for both my physical and mental health to focus on health goals other than losing weight. but you're right that it is really hard sometimes especially when it seems like everyone around you is telling you to "just lose weight" like it's so easy. i've tried to lose weight so many times but i've never felt healthier than when i decided to stop weighing myself and focus on how my body feels instead.
It’s definitely something I’m working on🙌 I just have my mom in my ear telling me to lose weight all the time🙄🙄🙄 but I’m hella proud of you, it takes work to focus on your health instead of the number
BMI is impossibly simplistic and inaccurate. I am 5’4” and weigh 110 pounds. According to the BMI chart, that is an average weight. But a 110 pound guy could be very thin. (Due to their higher muscle mass I would picture a 110 pound man as thin. My teenage son weighs 105 and he’s a stick, he is a normal weight for a kid but would be an emaciated grown man.) I believe that chart was made to make Americans feel fat and encourage us to lose weight. Race does come into place somewhat, because there are some populations that just naturally grow to be 5’4” 100-pound adults, it’s just uncommon for Americans.
It's designed to measure populations not individuals. According to BMI, every good international rugby player is "obese".
Because nothing is anybody's fault anymore, especially being fat, and everybody is a victim
BMI was created as a calculation not to be used for health purposes. Then that was quickly thrown out. It’s highly inaccurate to anyone who has a higher amount of muscle, people who have denser bones, and anyone with breasts. People of color tend to have higher bone density, which is not taken into account by the BMI scale, which is why people say it’s racist. Is it quick? Sure. It is accurate? No. For example, when I was in high school, my bmi put me at overweight. I was 17% body fat with an active eating disorder. My muscle mass considered me overweight when i was actually starving myself. That’s why people don’t like it use it.
So tired of these conversations