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According to the body mass index, I am obese. The body mass index, more commonly referred to as the BMI, is a measure of the amount of body fat someone has. It is used in the medical field as a health indicator. I cannot overstate how unbelievably flawed this tool is.
BMI is calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms by the square of your height in meters. Those two numbers don’t say much, or nearly as much as a few questions could, but that isn’t even the half of it.
The BMI was created in 1832 by a statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, who wanted to define the normal man resting at the center of a bell curve. It was not intended for individuals but for populations. Quetelet wanted to define populations with numbers.
Because BMI was developed in the 1800s, the demographic that the test targets is not representative of all populations. Because this method is based on only one type of person, the results only apply to that type of person. Women, especially women of color, are misrepresented by the BMI.
“The BMI has an extensive history of being manipulated to fuel anti-fat biases and agendas.”
Quetelet’s index went ignored for the next 100 or so years until it was adopted by insurance agencies in the 1950s. These agencies created small, medium and large categories to place people into, disregarding other factors like age. With no real science behind it, this method was used to determine policy prices, charging people in the largest category more money.
Because this was adopted by insurance companies, there is no doubt in my mind that these were established only for profit, which makes the categories suspect, to say the least. If an insurance company can charge fatter people more money on the basis of health risks, why would they not categorize as many people as fat as possible?
In 1972, Ancel Keys would take over promotion for the BMI. Keys was a famous researcher and physiologist at the time who created the U.S. military K-ration.
“The best relative weight index is the one that shows the least correlation with body height,” said Keys, acknowledging that the BMI was flawed in comparison to methods like density tests. However, these tests were impractical to be carried out with any sort of frequency. Keys also went on to state that only about half of the fatness measured by the BMI was accurate.
BMI is a large barrier for many people who want to get surgeries. This includes nonbinary and trans people who are looking for gender-affirming care. If someone wanted to donate their eggs, they would need a BMI between 18-29. When the bar to qualify for certain surgeries is an incredibly inaccurate test, it is time to rethink the health measures used.
The World Health Organization is also a participating force in the flawed nature of the BMI. Before 1997, “Obese” was not a category, at least not for anyone below a BMI of 30 kg. This changed, and the overweight categories were changed to preobesity and obese. The following year, the categories were changed to what they are now: normal, overweight and obese. These changes were adopted by the National Institutes of Health.
As a CNN article stated at the time, “Millions of Americans became ‘fat’ Wednesday — even if they didn’t gain a pound.”
These classifications and their changing qualifications fuel anti-fat bias and perpetuate health myths about fat individuals.
The BMI has an extensive history of being manipulated to fuel anti-fat biases and agendas, not to mention the fact that the data that backs up Quetelet’s index is made of white men only. By using an index originally made to quantify populations, the BMI is incredibly flawed. The categories of the BMI are set by arbitrary weights, historically used to categorize more and more people as obese.
Reach Audrey Weishaar at letters@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.
