I’ve said many times before that we should stop computing BMI (Body Mass Index), we should stop basing any sort of judgments on it, and we should just stop even remembering that it exists. It’s a terrible measure of health, and it mistakenly classifies all sorts of people as healthy or unhealthy. Well, now I can say the same thing again. But this time with science! Chad Orzel, physicist and new father, says:
This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever put the stats for their favorite pro athlete into a BMI calculator (you want to tell Michael Strahan he’s obese?), but it’s nice to see it holds more widely.
He references a NYT article that I won’t bother to read because, frankly, the NYT gets on my nerves. But it says just what I said above – if you use BMI to judge a person’s health, you’re going to be wrong much of the time.