this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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BMI is only useful at a population-level, and certainly not for athletes.
Most people are not particularly athletic, though.
It's not actually useful on a population level because it's at best a very inaccurate measurement of a serious oversimplification of a very complex system. It also actively causes harm on the individual level through healthcare providers and insurance.
Weight stigma causes worse health outcomes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381543/
It's an oversimplification, yes. It's a deliberate one, designed to be easy to collect at a population-level.
It's a bit like turning down the resolution a whole lot on an image - you lose details to the point where there's a whole lot you can no longer tell from the image, but some parts of the whole picture can still be interpreted.
In the case of BMI, this is stuff at a statistical level, the one where you need thousands of people and multiple percentage points to actually be able to tell stuff.
I don't disagree. It's not made for this purpose and should not be used for it either. A larger solution of getting rid of private health insurance as a system is what I would recommend, of course.
It's horrible that this has to be added as a caveat, but I'll add it anyway:
It's not ok to be mean to people on account of what they weigh
"Easy to collect" and "useful" aren't necessarily correlated. Waist size, for example, deals with a few of the problems with BMI like athletic builds (but not the general issue of correlating weight with health) and should be easier to collect as a tape measure is more portable than a scale. Still stuck with BMI though for some reason.
They don't need to be athletes to be healthy but overweight. They just need to not be a starving peasant in the 1800s to be overweight by BMI calculations.