Body Mass Index (BMI), or the ratio of a person's height and weight, was originally invented as an economic tool but it eventually became a gauge for people's health. Individuals who are considered overweight or obese based on their BMI are often portrayed as unhealthy with high risks for a number of health conditions such as cardiovascular diseases.
Findings of a new study, however, have found that obese and overweight Americans may be perfectly healthy in terms of blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol level. Many thin individuals, on the other hand, are not healthy at all.
For the study published in the International Journal of Obesity on Feb. 4, Janet Tomiyama from the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues looked at the link between BMI and a range of health markers, which include cholesterol, triglyceride, blood pressure and blood glucose levels and found that nearly half of Americans considered overweight, 29 percent of those who are considered obese and even 16 percent of obesity type II/III individuals are healthy.
More than 30 percent of individuals with normal weight, on the other hand, were deemed cardiometabolically unhealthy.
"The public is used to hearing 'obesity,' and they mistakenly see it as a death sentence," Tomiyama said. "But obesity is just a number based on BMI, and we think BMI is just a really crude and terrible indicator of someone's health."
Tomiyama said that the findings reveal that individuals with high BMI could be unfairly saddled with high health insurance costs because of a flawed measure of actual health.
Individuals with higher BMI could pay higher health insurance premiums once a rule proposed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is approved. The proposed rule would allow employers to charge higher insurance rates to individuals with BMI of 25 and higher.
Tomiyama said that doctors do not use BMI as a measure of healthiness so the EEOC's proposed rules should not either.
"Using BMI categories as the main indicator of health, an estimated 74 936 678 US adults are misclassified as cardiometabolically unhealthy or cardiometabolically healthy," Tomiyama and colleagues wrote. "Policymakers should consider the unintended consequences of relying solely on BMI, and researchers should seek to improve diagnostic tools related to weight and cardiometabolic health."
