Reasons why the BMI is useless

[LSLGuy]

@DSeid

FWIW there is some promotion of using a different simple to measure metric: the body roundness index (BRI). NYT recently had an article on it but here is some actual source material.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2819558

It won’t be perfect either, but it seems a step up?

@puzzlegal has started a dedicted thread on this:

Obesity and body roundness indicator

I ran into this today in the New York Times, but this graphic they link is much more eloquent than the article: BMI (a function of weight and height) has been criticized for not distinguishing between fat and muscle, and generally being an unhelpful number. Healthy athletes often have a high BMI, and unhealthy elderly people with wasting muscles often have a “good” BMI. In this 2013 article Diana M Thomas came up with a function of height and waist circumference that better measures “body ro…