There’s Finally an Alternative to BMI — But Is It Any Better?

Originally created nearly 200 years ago, body mass index (commonly known as BMI) has grown to become a premier indicator of health. The ratio of height-to-weight metric is widely used in medicine to estimate body fat and label people as fit, overweight, obese, or extremely obese. But critics note that the risk-of-disease measure doesn’t adequately account for body-fat percentage, bone density, or muscle mass — nor does it delineate abdominal fat from gluteofemoral fat, important factors regarding insulin resistance, metabolic disease, and cardiovascular issues. Further, ethical and racial concerns have long clouded BMI’s relevance: No women were included in the 1970s studies that brought BMI to the forefront. What’s more, these studies were not properly representative of different ethnicities, races, and backgrounds, according to a 2023 academic literature review of BMI. Making the waters even murkier, BMI was never intended for medical use — its innovator (a statistician) and modernizer (a physiologist who coined the term in the ’70s) were researchers, not medical professionals.