Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse.
Most of you know the term "BMI," short for Body Mass Index, which looks at your weight versus your height.
Many critics say that BMI doesn't factor in muscle mass, genetics, body shape, or lifestyle, so it isn't a reliable benchmark for health.
Unfortunately, when you add a simple waist measurement and blood test to the test, even more Americans are classified as obese!
From Study Finds:
Roughly one in four American adults whose weight reads as 'normal' on the standard charts already carry the kind of organ or physical trouble that defines a newer, stricter diagnosis called clinical obesity.
That diagnosis does not rest on weight alone. It pairs two things: extra body fat, measured around the waist and hips rather than by weight on a scale, and real evidence of organ or physical trouble of the kind excess fat is linked to, such as high blood pressure, troubled blood sugar or cholesterol, a fat-laden liver, or difficulty with everyday movement. A person can clear the weight bar and still meet both halves of that definition.
The study was published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It looked at 5,642 "nonpregnant adults" older than 20, and tried to make the average age, gender, and racial participation match the general U.S. population.
A waist/hip measurement adds a more reliable form of calculating body fat than height and weight alone, as athletes with high muscle mass may be wrongly labeled as obese if they are absolutely shredded.
On the other side, you may get guys who look rather thin with a small beer gut but actually have a high body fat ratio because of sedentary lives.
When you add a blood test to the mix, you get even more reliable data. You can look "normal" but have high blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol - all problems related to obesity that will absolutely wreck your life in the long run.
When the researchers flagged excess fat using two or three abnormal waist-based measurements, regardless of what the scale said, about 78 percent of adults qualified as carrying too much fat. That is, in the authors' phrasing, 'nearly double the prevalence detected by BMI-based definitions.'
Yes, that's right. Almost 80% of American adults are fat, nearly double what BMI alone indicates.
Clinical obesity showed up in about 26 percent of adults with a normal BMI, more than 50 percent of those classed as overweight, and 85 percent of those with the most severe obesity. The bottom line is blunt: a normal number on the scale was no guarantee that a body was metabolically in the clear.
To be fair to the fatties, this is a cross-sectional study, so it's only looking at one moment at a time. Genetics and lifestyle play as much of a role in things like cardiovascular disease as body fat.
That being said, I don't think any of us can deny that 4 in 5 Americans could stand to lose some weight, given the massive burden that obesity-related health problems are putting on the U.S. healthcare system.
(The CDC says obesity costs the nation $173 billion annually; another study estimated $261 billion in 2016 alone.)
After all, movie audiences believed this was fat in 1987:
And this was considered clownishly overweight in the 1990s:
I'll be right back after I run a few miles!
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