Is BMI A Scam?

[Julieanne]

Alice Callahan
May 18 2021

It can be a helpful health measure for large groups of people, but it won’t tell you much about yourself.

There are few single measures in health care that seem to carry as much weight as body mass index, or B.M.I. We encounter it not just at doctor’s offices, but with online calculators and smart scales, at gyms and even when determining eligibility for the Covid vaccine.
Its formula is simple: Take your weight (in kilograms), and divide by the square of your height (in meters). The result, which slots you into one of four main categories, is meant to describe your body in a single word or two: underweight (B.M.I. less than 18.5), normal weight (18.5 to 24.9), overweight (25.0 to 29.9) or obese (30 or greater).

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/s...8b0e20e9725adc

[Maurya]

BMI is such a rough estimate that it fails to take any individual factors into account. One wants to maintain a healthy ratio of fat to lean body mass. BMI is nothing but a different way of displaying what we used to have with the height and weight tables. If two people have exactly the same BMI, but one of them has 30% body fat, and the other person has 10% body fat, then that identical BMI measurement becomes meaningless.