1850 - BMI

Just as there is a TV story about companies starting to discriminate in hiring based on Body Mass Index, here comes an article saying BMI is a bunch of hooie.

As if the nation's weight problems were not daunting enough, a new study has found that the body mass index, the 180-year-old formula used to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy weight, may be incorrectly classifying about half of women and just over 20% of men as being the picture of health when their body-fat composition suggests they are obese.
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Simple measures such as waist circumference, hip circumference and waist-to-hip ratios have gained new adherents as criticism of the BMI has mounted. At the University of Alabama, researchers are set to explore whether a computer program can analyze a series of photographs of a patient and, based on known patterns of fat deposition and musculature, recognize dangerous fat better than the BMI alone.
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Physicians should also consider taking routine measures of patients' leptin levels as a useful indicator of body composition and possibly a predictor of obesity-related disease, he said. Leptin could become as valuable as cholesterol and blood pressure are as harbingers of disease risk, he said.

WHOLE ARTICLE in the LA TIMES.


And then there's the CHART of women overweight by state.