Having a BMI that groups you in the 'overweight' category doesn't necessarily mean in increased risk of death, a new study finds, shedding more light on BMI's flaws as a health measurement.
July 6, 2023 -- Eric Collard has always been an athlete; he played college football, got into triathlons in adulthood, and now at age 44, regularly rides his bike, runs, lifts weights, plays golf, and more. The Ottawa-based director of a nonprofit, Collard also takes his nutrition seriously. By almost all measures -- blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar -- Collard is fit and healthy.
A new study from Rutgers University is shedding some light on the accuracy of BMI as a sign of increased mortality risk. The results? When classified as obese by BMI alone, the measurement largely gets it wrong. The makeup was on average 46 years old, 50% female, and 69% non-Hispanic white. Of those people, 35% had a BMI between 25 and 30, which is defined as overweight, and 27.2% had a BMI above or equal to 30, which classifies them as obese. Visaria and his team then followed up at a median of 9 years, with a maximum of 20 years, which showed 75,807 participants had died.
Lately, there’s been a shift away from the long-standing health metric. In June at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, delegates adopted a new policy aimed at clarifying how BMI should be used in medicine. Instead, Schofer suggested, doctors need to better understand their patients and their lifestyles. “We need to understand what is important to the individual, what health means to them, and how to develop and reach goals that are important to them,” she said. “I remove weight and BMI from the conversation. Instead, we talk about how we want to feel, what we want to do, and how we want to be.”
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