X-Message-Number: 30849
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:21:45 -0400
From: hrhirsch <>
Subject: BMI 

The BMI is one of those scientific "facts" that reminds me of Mark 
Twains observation about humor: "If you repeat anything often enough, 
it becomes funny." As Ettinger recently noted, "The BMI relates only 
height and weight. Surely the build or bone structure enters 
too."  Consider two people with whom I was acquainted: One could 
carry a 200 lb refrigerator on his back up 3 flights of stairs. The 
other was a slender Asian woman. Neither was obese, but they 
certainly had different values of BMI. However the dietary "experts" 
use BMI as a measure of obesity. They have read each others papers so 
often that they have ceased to question the common sense of what they 
have read and treat this as a fact. Physiologists measure obesity by 
skin fold thickness or, for greater accuracy, actual density 
calculated from mass and water displacement.

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