You could be obese and not know it — new definitions challenge BMI

Detailed summary

A massive new study from participants in China, Spain, the UK and US suggests BMI is missing obesity in up to one in 12 people.

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We’ve long known that little number, your BMI, is not actually that great at doing what it’s designed to: determine whether a patient is underweight, “healthy,” overweight or obese.

Now, a new definition is showing much better success for diagnosing obesity. With it, experts say more people will be accurately diagnosed with obesity and better able to get the treatments suitable for their situation.

A massive new study from participants in China, Spain, the UK and US suggests BMI is missing obesity in up to one in 12 people.

Plus, a third of obesity cases could be “clinical” — a new category under the new framework that was hidden with BMI. Clinical obesity is “an active disease that should be treated as such,” said author Francesco Rubino.

BMI, a calculation invented in the 1830s has long been relied on to determine if a patient is at a healthy weight.

Experts have raised issues for decades, saying it doesn’t tell the full story. For example, BMI doesn’t say how much of your weight is fat, or how and where the fat is distributed through your body.

“BMI-based measures of obesity can both underestimate and overestimate” the amount of fat stored in the body, the commission who proposed a new definition for obesity last year wrote.

Yet BMI is still used for everything from health screening for conditions like heart disease, deciding whether you can have certain medicines, and the dose of those medications, too.

Opening of the article, excerpted from New York Post. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.