(theindianrepublic.com) A new study came to the conclusion that body mass index (BMI) is a really crude and awful indicator of someone's health.
Recently the Commission for Equal Opportunity in Employment in the United States proposed a rule that would grant employers the right to penalize certain employees with fees that reach up to 30 percent of their total insurance cost if they don't meet a number of 24 health criteria.
Their findings, which appear in the International Journal of Obesity, suggest that 34.4 million Americans considered overweight by virtue of BMI are actually healthy, as are 19.8 million who are considered obese.
The researchers noted that previous research did not find a clear link between weight and height, and its relation to various health markers, meaning that just because a person is of a particular weight and height doesn't necessarily mean their blood pressure will be in normal range or even an unhealthy range, for example.
Study authors concluded that since these people's BMI does not affect their health, overcharging them on a false assumption would be unfair.
Looking at the relationship between the BMI and factors such as blood sugar, blood pressure, triglyceride, and cholesterol levels, the team led by Tomiyama found some pretty interesting statistics regarding the accuracy of the BMI's health gauging abilities.
"Not only does BMI mislabel 54 million heavier individuals as unhealthy, it actually overlooks a large group of individuals considered to have a "healthy" BMI who are actually unhealthy when you look at underlying clinical indicators", said Hunger.
Can you be both healthy and overweight?
"Many people see obesity as a death sentence", said A. Janet Tomiyama, an assistant professor of psychology in the UCLA College and the study's lead author.
In other news EurekAlert reported, the results showed that more than 2 million people identified as "very obese" by virtue of having a BMI of 35 or higher are, in reality, healthy; that's about 15 percent of Americans so classified.
Most doctors and experts believe obesity has ballooned into a massive global health crisis, although much of the statistics use BMI as a yardstick. (Full Story)
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