Over half of worldwide adults to be overweight or obese by 2050, warns study
A new study warns that by 2050, nearly 60% of adults and one-third of children globally will be overweight or obese without governmental intervention. Published in the Lancet, the study analysed data…
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Just a reminder that by these standards nearly every person that lifts weights regularly is morbidly obese.
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.
It also actively causes harm on the individual level through healthcare providers and insurance.
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.
Weight stigma causes worse health outcomes
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.
Something tells me the problem isn't too many weightlifters.
We don't genuinely know since bmi is a useless stat made by a rando that knew as much about medicine as the average dropout. It's great for roughly pegging a human to a 150 year old average of peasant weights, and it's great for sensationalist headlines, but it's pretty pointless otherwise. The Rock, for instance, has the same BMI as Gabriel Iglesias.
People are larger than they were in the 1800s, in every dimension, thanks to better nutrition and fewer famines. Of course BMI is going to go up when we never update the standards for what is or isn't overweight.