Someone recently shared an article with me (What Everyone Is Afraid To Say About Obesity) that is mostly about obesity and the Body Mass Index (BMI). It slams the BMI as being clumsy and inaccurate, failing to "differentiate between fat weight and muscle weight". And it's true. (Briefly alluded to here in The Planet way back in 2012.)
But the article uses three specific examples--Shaquille O'Neal, Muhammed Ali, and Sonny Liston--who are hardly "average" people. They're all professional athletes! (And all African American males.) The article does acknowledge this with the phrase "these elite athletes" but what is the context for all of this? It's about how the results of a national program to combat obesity won't be accurately measured by the BMI.
The percentage of the population who are "elite athletes" is statistically insignificant. The percentage of well-muscled people is certainly higher, and we can add the "skinny couch potato at high risk of heart disease" and still not make a huge dent in the numbers. That doesn't mean BMI is a great measure, but it's an understandable choice since, "It’s just too easy to use. Pretty much anyone can find a website that will calculate their BMI from the comfort of their own home."
The article mentions "a few simple alternatives to the BMI scale — none of which are terribly complicated, but all of which are just a little more difficult than a simple online calculator." The first is fat calipers, "but those require a trained professional to use reliably." That's really just a little more difficult?
The second is to "measure waist circumference with a tape measure" but is this uniformly reliable? Don't some people carry their fat in other places, like their hips or thighs? (Waist-to-hip ratio is another well-known measure, and one of the things we use in Blended Fitness.)
Bottom line: yeah, BMI sucks. But when measuring on a massive scale (national), it's better than nothing, or alternatives that are hard to implement and have their own accuracy issues.
Be seeing you.
-gary