Better Than BMI While many people may equate their health with the number they see when they step on a scale, your Body Mass Index (BMI) is generally accepted to give a more accurate indication of your health than your weight alone. BMI is more accurate in this regard because instead of merely weighing the body, it also takes height into consideration. For instance, if you are 6 feet tall, your healthy weight range is higher than that of someone who is 5 feet 5 inches tall. Since BMI is more precise, yet still easy to calculate (there are currently dozens of free BMI calculators available online), it has been used in some form for the last 200 years. However, lately there has been some speculation about new measurements of physical health that might be even more accurate than BMI.
Problems with BMI One of the problems with BMI is that it is still too general of a measurement. Taking into account that it is incapable of distinguishing between a number of important factors such as age, gender, percentage of muscle mass, body type, and ethnic groups, BMI begins to seem like a very arbitrary way of determining somebody’s health. For instance, athletes who train intensively can develop large amounts of muscle that add to the body’s overall weight. Thus we could find that taller individuals who are obviously overweight are being given a similar BMI to shorter athletes. Due to the BMI’s inability to deliver a sufficiently accurate measurement, some scientists and medical researchers have been turning to other methods of determining one’s physical health. One of these is the Body Adiposity Index (BAI). The BAI is based on ratios involving measurements of the height and the hips, which allows for a much more flexible and accommodating alternative to the traditional BMI. However, while the BAI has been proven to give more accurate readings than the BMI, it is less convenient to calculate, with the necessary measurements requiring a doctor’s office and trained personnel in order to be computed correctly. Although the BAI still needs some work, it has been proven to be more accurate than the BMI, which could lead to its prevalence in the future.
Other Methods Another promising measuring technique on the medical horizon is even simpler to obtain than the BMI; the waist-to-height ratio. The waist-to-height ratio is determined by measuring exactly what you’d guess from its name: the waist and the height. After the measurements are taken, they are compared to see how close the circumference of your waist is to your height. People whose waist measurements are less than half of their height measurements have been proven to be healthier, with fewer instances of stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. The great thing about this technique is that it can accurately
measure children and help predict their risk of obesity, since both their waist size and their height will increase as they grow. While the medical community has yet to completely adopt a successor to the BMI measurement, the fact that there are accurate options to choose from is encouraging. With the number of people that use their BMI ratio as evidence that they need to fly down to Mexico for weight loss surgery, it pays to use a measurement that can tell you the true state of your body and your health before making such an important decision.