What is BMI, or body mass index?
BMI is a tool used by health specialists, dietitians, and nutritionists, as well as some insurance companies, to estimate the risk of health problems related to the presence of higher body weight and body fatness.
What are most common weight-related diseases?
People with high BMI are at higher risks of experiencing adverse issues they can face.
Obese people that are high BMI values(above 30) have greater chances to suffer from symptoms like high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, reduced insulin sensitivity, and slugged metabolism.
These symptoms, if not treated, can further result in more severe and chronic health complications such as diabetes, fatty liver disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, stroke, and cancer.
What Indicates BMI?
BMI is a measure of body mass (muscle, fat, and bone), and in that way, it can show you whether you have extra body weight and, more precisely, whether your weight is healthy for your height.
While BMI is not a primary indicator of excess body fat, it expresses the weight-height connection, thus gives a more accurate measure than the bodyweight alone.
It is thereby, a commonly used method from medical communities for diagnosing overweight and obesity because one of the outward signs of your health status is your body fatness, and the BMI figure shows it.
Even for ordinary people, calculating BMI is a fast and easy means to measure their risk for health disorders that can occur with the presence of excess body fatness.
To summarize, when a person’s BMI increases, so do his or her risk of specific health issues increases also.
Cases Where Applying Of BMI Would Be Misleading And Inaccurate
We saw what Body Mass Index indicates but it is even more important to reveal also what it misses to show! BMI is misleading in some cases, and it is because it does not make a difference between body mass and body fat.
BMI is a rough estimation, and the results can be somewhat misleading for some groups of people.
* Bodybuilders or athletes are usually with a higher muscle mass and less body fat as they may have a high BMI but not be a more significant health risk.
* The older adults over 65 who may have weight loss from age and also are with lower muscle mass.
* BMI value wouldn’t be accurate for children and teenagers under 18 who have not completed their growth.
* Pregnant women should not use BMI. The woman’s body composition changes during pregnancy and lactation, so using BMI will be misleading to them.
* From what kind of ethnical group you are, is a factor that can also affect your risk of some health diseases? For example, Asian people origin may have a higher risk of health problems at BMI levels below 25.
For What Type Of People Is Proper BMI Measurement
BMI does not consider what is your body type shape, where your body stores fat, or what is the amount of your muscle mass, thus it can provide us incomplete but still meaningful information.
Nowadays, many experts consider that the BMI index is correct, but mainly when we speak about people who are VERY underweight or VERY overweight or obese.
And it seems to be less accurate to rely on it to define the health risk for people who are slightly overweight or slightly underweight.
BMI, by itself, cannot define where fat is distributed on the body, but this is an essential factor for medics and dietitians, helping them to identify possible health risks.
And indeed, they are right because visceral fat, for example, is significantly more dangerous compare to subcutaneous fat.