To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And the proverbial hammer we often talk about is the BMI, a simple height/weight ratio that's more and more being used to identify and punish everyone from schoolchildren to the lederly for being fat.
Of course, BMI is a crude tool, a hammer, if you will, because it doesn't take into account muscle mass, or percentage of body fat, or anything beyond height and weight. So most athletes fall into the overweight if not obese category, according to BMI charts. Tom Cruise's BMI makes him obese, because he's short and densely muscled.
Now, finally, someone somewhere is paying attention. In a study published in Nutrition Journal, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy did a small study looking at how weight loss recommendations would change for a group of people when they applied different measures of overweight:
The researchers obtained each person's BMI as well as body-fat measurements including waist circumference and total percent body fat. The also calculated a measurement similar to BMI that identifies fat mass called body fat mass index. The investigators then compared the percentage of the study group that would be told to lose weight according to each calculation.
BMI calculations, they found, identified 11 percent of the group as needing strong recommendations to lose weight and 41 percent as needing basic recommendations to lose weight. By contrast, waist circumference measurements indicated about 25 percent would need strong recommendations to shed pounds and 36 percent would need basic weight loss recommendations, Colombo said.
Moreover, 29 percent and 48 percent would have received similar weight loss recommendations according to total percent body fat measurements, while 21 percent and 54 percent would receive the same, according to body fat mass index.
The lead researcher, Dr. Ottavio Columbo, concluded, "Using criteria based on body adiposity (fatness) rather than body weight would result in a much greater proportion of the study population receiving recommendations for weight loss."
Yeah. We coulda told you that. But hey, it's a start.