this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (16 children)

To study this, Anderson and her team looked at the most recent self-reported body mass index (BMI) data from 746,250 Canadians who were 18 years or older between 2009 and 2023.

Maybe because BMI was never intended to be an indicator of health and is just a simple and dirty math formula invented by a Belgian astronomer 200 years ago?

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/publications/health-matters/is-bmi-accurate

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-02/the-problem-with-the-body-mass-index-bmi/100728416

BMI is just weight and height, a pound of muscle, a pound of fat, a pound of bone...

Doesn't matter, a pound is a pound.

I failed BMI everytime I got measured in the military, they had to "rope and choke" which is a more time consuming method where waist/neck measurements were used. If I had still failed that, I'd have been given a buoyancy test as well for an even more accurate tests.

But it's hard to call someone obese after you just measured the circumference of their abs...

When used as an average of a population BMI isbetter but it was made based on what weights were considered healthy for a white man 200 years ago, way before protein and weight training. And when the average person was like 5'6.

Lots of clearly healthy white men are labeled obese because of that. And no one else was even involved in coming up with the system, so they've always been getting wrong results.

It's fucking insane we're still using this ancient flawed method when we have so many better ways. Especially since the largest determiner of height back then was access to enough calories when young. Pretty much everyone is getting that now. And reaching their max height which is where BMI has always been the most flawed.

Like, obesity is an undeniable problem. But BMI is the least scientific metric we could be using short of some bullshit like astrology signs. The obesity epidemic too serious to fuck around like this

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I'm curious why you think there's an obesity epidemic if BMI as bad as you claim. Surely this means the problem is blown way out of proportion and the obesity rates are actually much lower?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nope.

Because lots of obese people have healthy bmi's

They're usually the ones blowing badly defending it and haven't had blood work done in a decade. They have no idea how unhealthy they are

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sorry for the repeat questions but I'm not too knowledgeable on this; I thought BMI would have more false-positives (very muscular people for e.g.), but it seems you're saying false negatives are a greater concern.

Would that be people with extremely low muscle mass so they have a BMI that might only show as overweight but due to body fat percentage they're obese?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

but it seems you’re saying false negatives are a greater concern.

Someone with a bad BMI but healthy will get further testing and told they're healthy...

Someone with a "good BMI" because they have bird bones and no muscle, just fat, will never have further testing done and always insist BMI is all that matters. You can see it anytime BMI comes up, people ignore all evidence that say they may need to look deeper than that single number.

Consider life in the 1830s to now, it would have been impossible for even the wealthiest to avoid exercise and consume as many calories as the average modern human. Shit just isn't comparable.

There's no logical reason to keep using it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

While I agree with you that there can be a risk of skinny people missing diagnosis because they're "healthy", I think you're overestimating how well fat people are treated in healthcare. If a patient is fat, there is no further testing done. They're told to lose weight whether healthy or not, and regardless of whether it's relevant to their concerns or not. Obesity is still used as a cutoff to deny access to surgeries that will measurably improve their health, despite there often being no increased risk of complication.

As I said, I don't disagree with your issue about skinny causing medical neglect: the way our society, including medicine, blindly follows weight as the only thing that matters (examples above for fat individuals, telling skinny people with terminal illnesses they look great for having lost weight, amputating functional organs to cause malnourishment and by extension weight loss, even to folks who are arguably healthy and in a mid to low BMI range...) Is detrimental to everyone's well being.

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