May 15, 2024 — The symposium that packed an auditorium at ECO2024 yesterday dealt with the fundamental need to get beyond BMI for defining clinical obesity. It seems so simple. “Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health,” says the World Health Organization. And yet that definition ties back to BMI for […]
October 18, 2023 — We’re starting to feel pity for the poor, tortured metric of BMI. Put BMI into your Google search box and the top suggestion is “BMI inaccurate.” The top news about BMI right now comes from Nature and it explains “Why BMI is flawed – and how to redefine obesity.” And therein lies the problem. BMI […]
August 30, 2021 — Exercise for weight loss is a durable concept. Some advocates even push for food labels to describe the exercise necessary to burn calories in a food serving. But the premise for this is false. A new study in Current Biology explains the problem better than ever before. It turns out that when a person does […]
August 20, 2020 — This is unfolding today in the New England Journal of Medicine. A fascinating little study of 22 patients is offering up a comparison of apples and scalpels today. The researchers compared metabolic effects of weight loss from very low calorie diets and from bariatric surgery. They found similar effects for similar amounts of weight loss. […]
February 26, 2020 — We hear lots of arguments about diagnosing obesity. Some people say it’s all about BMI. Sometimes they use this as a straw man argument for saying that BMI has flaws, so obesity isn’t really a thing. But other people are putting forward thoughtful proposals for diagnosing and staging the chronic disease of obesity. One such […]
July 28, 2019 — We all love to beat up on BMI. That measure may be good for epidemiologists who need a way to define obesity in a population. But it’s not so good for defining obesity in an individual. For that matter, it’s not the definition for obesity itself. Obesity is excess adiposity that harms health. And a […]
December 11, 2017 — Maybe it’s progress. Five years ago social media was full of explicitly hateful fat-shaming content. More often than not, complaints fell on deaf ears. But Friday, we learned that Google now considers merely asking about the word fat to be distasteful and offensive. Google Surveys will no longer ask people what they think about the […]
November 18, 2017 — BMI can be quite a useful screening tool, but it’s a lousy definition, by itself, for obesity. Want one more reason? Take a look at a new study by Hailey Banack and colleagues in Menopause. They’ve found that a BMI of 30 is not a reliable dividing line for obesity in women after menopause. Poor Sensitivity […]
September 6, 2017 — When it comes to BMI, everyone is a hater. Even so, most people are content to keep using it as an easy number to screen adults for obesity. But for kids, everyone knows BMI just doesn’t work. In Pediatrics this month, Bill Dietz describes “widespread agreement” that BMI scores for kids with severe obesity are […]
March 19, 2016 — Everyone seems to hate BMI and yet none of the myriad alternatives get much traction. Two new studies look at one of the core problems — a “U-shaped” relationship between BMI and mortality. At the extremes, low BMI and high BMI are both associated with the risk of an early death. But in the middle, the […]
