There is a scene in doctor's offices on a daily basis. A doctor is taking a patient's vital signs. The ratio of weight to squared height is used to calculate the Body Mass index.
The prognosis will be frightening if the weight falls above the cutoff. The patient may be told by the doctor that they are at risk of developing diseases. Lose weight is the only solution.
It wasn't meant to be used that way.
It doesn't tell you anything about a person's health, according to Dr. FatimaCodyStanford, an obese medicine physician and associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
An expert says that you should be paying more attention to your health and less to your body mass index.
If you have a higher body weight, you are more likely to develop a life-threatening disease such as diabetes or high-blood pressure. It isn't a diagnosis.
She said that you can be lean and have disease but not have as much disease as if you were obese.
It can be misleading to put too much emphasis on a target weight when it comes to a body mass index.
The case of a patient who weighed over 500 pounds and had low testosterone levels was recalled by the doctor.
He was able to lose weight and no longer had health issues.
She wondered if severe Obesity was causing any health problems at this point. I wouldn't.
It had nothing to do with medicine at the time.
Albert Quetelet was a sociologist from the early 1800s who was tasked with finding the perfect or average human.
His thoughts on what an ideal human looks like have been discredited.
The first metric to be defined was weight to height squared. White French and Belgian men were only seen as a small representation of humanity.
The ratio wasn't meant to be linked to health. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built actuarial tables based on height and weight. They used data from their white customers.
The metric was only designed to measure the risk of dying if you are white.
Black and Asian people might not be at the same risk as white people with the same body mass index.
The risk factors behind cardiometabolic issues like diabetes, heart disease, or stroke are more complex than just having excess weight.
Where we carry our fat is more important than the amount of fat we have.
Some fat cells are better than others. It's more likely that fat around internal organs leads to disease.
It is possible that wrapped around the hips may have a protective effect.
The size of the waist is a more reliable measure of risk than the body mass index.
Women with a waist size over 35 inches and men with a waist size over 40 inches are at greater risk of developing diseases.
It's hard to tell if a person is healthy without other measures of ill health.
Doctors will use a body mass index to prescribe weight loss.
Patients who have their doctor only focus on body mass index should be advised byStanford.
"Okay doctor, I hear that." She said that they'll probably challenge them because they've only thought about the current health status of the person, not the current body mass index.
The previous version of this article was contributed byErin BrodWIN.
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