The BMI ( Indicator Of Heart Disease Risk ) is Wrong

What the Numbers Really Mean

After years of throwing terms around like “overweight”, “obese”, and “morbidly obese”, doctors are conceding that the BMI where they derived those terms might actually be wrong. The BMI (Body Mass Index) has been around for almost 100 years, but since 1998, the BMI has been the gold standard that doctors and the government use to determine whether or not a person was fat. To calculate BMI, you divide your weight by the square of your height. For those of us who are not math majors, several websites and charts hanging in our doctors’ offices are happy to tell us if we are overweight or obese. For instance, my sister who is 5’9” and a nice, trim, compact 170 pounds is considered overweight. 

But new research put out by the Mayo Clinic indicates that the BMI might not be the best indicator for obesity after all. An athletic, muscular man who is 5’10” and 200 pounds comes up “overweight” on the BMI scale because of his muscle mass. Muscle weighs more than fat, so simply using height and weight is not an accurate measure of a person’s fitness. BMIs that indicate a person is overweight (25-29) or obese (29 and up) can affect a person’s health and life insurance status erroneously. 

For years, it has been assumed that those indicated as “overweight” according to the BMI were at a much higher risk of dying from heart related conditions. But the new research that the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, published indicates something quite different. In their study of 250,000 people with heart disease, those with a BMI that indicated overweight status had less chance of dying from heart problems than those with a normal BMI. And people with a normal BMI were less likely to die than people with low BMI. And as expected, severely obese people did have a higher incidence of death from heart-related disease.