Too Fat? Maybe the Fat Police Are Wrong
Did you know? Arnold Schwarzenegger at 6’2″ and 257 pounds is officially ”obese?” So is Sylvester Stallone at 5′ 9″ and 228 pounds?
And look who is officially “overweight?,” George Clooney (5’11″, 211 pounds) Nicholas Cage (6’1″, 210 pounds) and President George Bush (5’11″, 191 pounds).
Absurd as it seems, that’s how these men are categorized by the body mass Index (BMI), a measure used by researchers and the government to tell who is normal, overweight or obese. Some experts now say the BMI is unreliable, misleading and should be scrapped.
The problem: the BMI merely considers weight and height and does not distinguish between fat and lean mass. That’s why someone like Schwarzenegger, who carries much of his weight in muscle, that weighs more than fat, gets labeled ”obese.”
Using the faulty BMI to can also produce distorted study results and misleading headlines about the health hazards of obesity, even sometimes proclaiming fat healthier.
In trying to explain why his recent widely-publicized study in the medical journal Lancet found that being overweight was more protective against heart disease than being thin, and that obese people were no more apt to die of heart disease than those of normal weight, the Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez blamed the use of a simplistic BMI to define who is fat.
Our study did not actually “prove obesity is harmless,” he said. Rather, it showed that the BMI is too simplistic. A far better indicator is waist and hip ratio. ”A patient who has excess fat will rarely have a small waist.” says Lopez-Jimenez. And studies show that excess abdominal or belly fat –an “apple” shape rather than a “pear” shape–predicts heart troubles.
Still, says Lopez-Jimenez, if your BMI is over 35, you are obese. But if your BMI is lower than 30 or 35, it’s unreliable because the lean-fat balance is unknown.
To determine your BMI: Take your weight in pounds; divide by your height in inches; divide again by your height in inches and multiply by 703. Consider 20-24 normal, 25-30 ”overweight” and over 30 obese. But you can’t really trust a figure under 30, say experts.
A Better Way: To find out if your waist-hip ratio is hazardous to your health, –Whether you are “an apple or a pear,” measure waist and hip circumferences, then divide waist size by hip size. For example, if a woman’s waist is 32″ and hips, 37″, her ratio is .86. A ratio above 0.85 for women and 0.90 for men means a higher than normal risk of heart disease and diabetes.
