Comments | lefthand: public service announcement

lefthand

public service announcement

Jul 06, 2009 11:04

The problem with most science is that when you distill it down to a level that is consumable for the average person, the science is no longer correct.
Top Ten reasons BMI is junk ScienceBMI makes a lot of assumptions about the physiology of all individuals and doesn't speak to deviations from that model. I am obese according to BMI (BMI 30) but I ( Read more... )

Comments 6

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lefthand July 6 2009, 18:28:58 UTC

That's the spirit. Most people would do well to aspire to your level unhealthiness.

ohari July 6 2009, 20:16:01 UTC

I love the tape measure bodyfat test.
In my military experience, my bodyfat % changed by as much as 8% depending on who did the test and whether or not they were having a bad day.
I had a First Sergeant for whom if you were over the table weight you were going to be over the body fat percentage if he had to strangle you with the tape to do it, and a company clerk for whom Jabba the Hutt probably would have passed.

lexica510 July 6 2009, 18:24:45 UTC

Least favorite bogus claim about the BMI: "It's not a height-weight chart!"

Oh, really? The only factors going into it are one's HEIGHT and one's WEIGHT. So how is it not a height-weight chart?

lefthand July 6 2009, 18:30:18 UTC

They said it isn't.
It's a formula for creating a height-weight chart, clearly different.

beckyzoole July 6 2009, 20:16:31 UTC

As far as I can tell, there is only one measure of body "mass" -- i.e., fat -- that is a legitimate predictor of health, and that's waist-hip ratio.

But that's not caught on so much, because it doesn't fit in with the national obsession with fat. You can be morbidly obese (as I am) and still have a very healthy waist-hip ratio (as I do).

Other than that, it's all up to fitness, decent nutrition, and genetics. BMI is pretty much useless as a predictor of health. (Except that low BMI has been linked to higher mortality rates, even in studies that control for smoking and pre-existing conditions.)

ithildae July 7 2009, 03:50:56 UTC

It's not just BMI. Most of the "Healthy Size (bs)" measures are off, if you rely on the science. One of my Prof's quoted a device rep as saying, "I don't care about the science. All I care about is the correlation!" There are indeed problems with relying on correlation.

Elf, in the Army, was on profile for fitness quite a bit in California. It turns out that she has large hips. She had this four pack going, and arms almost as big as mine (with as much definition), but she was classed as obese, and had to do extra PT, because the tape measure has no clue about what a healthy person actually looks like. (She was training for a marathon, and did the Bataan march this spring.)

How much damage is the obsessive devotion to weight and size doing to us?