Who invented bmi

This was no mean feat as Quetelet wanted to know everything from the average arm strength to the average age of marriage. In , he went public with his results in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. So well received were his findings that Quetelet subsequently published a book A Treatise on Man and the development of his aptitudes in on the topic.

In the work, Quetelet was adamant that his observations about weight measurements were correct. Take for example the following extract from Chapter Two. If man increased equally in all dimensions, his weight at different ages would be as the cube of his height. Now, this is not what we really observe. The increase of weight is slower, except during the first year after birth; then the proportion we have just pointed out is pretty regularly observed.

But after this period, and until near the age of puberty, weight increases nearly as the square of the height. The development of weight again becomes very rapid at puberty, and almost stops after the twenty-fifth year. However, muscle is about 18 percent more dense than fat, so this is clearly not true.

Still, Trefethen points out that if muscle is 18 percent denser than fat, a person who exercised enough to convert 10 percent of their fat into muscle would still increase their BMI by just 1. The BMI would still not represent the increase in fitness. However, some scientists argue that waist-to-height ratio might be more appropriate than BMI alone or BMI with WC, as research has proven it to be a predictor of cardiometabolic health.

Researchers have suggested that people keep their waist circumference to less than half their height to maximize health and life expectancy. A person with fat around the abdomen has a higher risk of heart disease and metabolic disorders, because the fat affects the internal organs such as the liver, heart, and kidneys.

Fat around the hips and thighs may be less risky. Studies have suggested that measuring fat gives a more accurate view of health and health risks, but getting an accurate measurement is not easy. However, researchers still need to do more work before these methods will become as easy as using a BMI calculator. People often assume that someone whose BMI says they are overweight or obese will be unhealthy, while someone with a normal BMI will be healthy. However, research published in suggested that this was incorrect for 75 million Americans.

Researchers found that 54 million Americans had been categorized as overweight or obese, but cardiometabolic measures showed they were healthy. Other scientists, however, have suggested that although some people may appear to be overweight but healthy, their higher weight puts them at higher risk of certain diseases as they get older. A research article published in concludes that, overall, people with obesity have a higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome than those without.

For now, it is probably the best guide we have. It may be more important to follow a healthy lifestyle with a balanced diet and regular exercise to prevent gaining excess weight in the first place. Today, over countries buy into the BMI as a measure of health, where a score of White bodies determined what counted as a "healthy" weight even before the BMI became ubiquitous, says Dr.

In , the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company MetLife developed height-weight tables using data primarily collected from a white population. These tables classified ideal weight ranges for both men and women based on three sizes: small, medium, and large. The goal was to use these tables to calculate how long a person would likely live based on their weight, and provide life insurance coverage accordingly.

In the s, Dr. Andres and other researchers resuscitated Quetelet's index by converting those mostly-white height-weight tables to create a new set of ratios that indicated "health" and, more specifically, a lower mortality rate.

He then concluded that BMI trumped both relative weight and frame size as an indicator of health and longevity—a conversion that would have huge impacts on BIPOC communities particularly women.

Strings, "even though it contains many of the same laws as the weight table in that the population for which it was developed was white. When she first heard about the history of the BMI, Dr. Strings wanted to believe that physicians had performed research on a racially and gender-representative population, as the BMI has evolved and changed over time it was most recently updated in Sadly, her search came up empty. Instead, in a lot of the early reports that use BMI, the population was largely white," says Dr.

That means that the American standards of health are inherently non-Hispanic white standards, even though research tells us that white people typically have different body types than those of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color.

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Synopsis: Coding for Obesity. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. International Journal of Obesity. PLoS One. Gurunathan U, Myles PS. British Journal of Anaesthesia. March Why Use BMI?

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