The most prominent council of doctors in the U.S., the American Medical Association (AMA) is poised to eliminate the long-standing Body Mass Index (BMI), which physicians use to determine body fat based on a ratio of weight to height, due to its “racist” roots.
The BMI, which has been used by doctors for 200 years, is now “indirect and imperfect” due to “racist exclusion,” per a recently issued report from the AMA’s Council on Science and Public Health.
The findings determined that “BMI does not appropriately represent racial and ethnic minorities” since it’s established by “the imagined ideal Caucasian” of the 19th century, lacking consideration of one’s ethnicity or gender.
The metric’s creator, mathematician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, determined in the late 1800s that the weight of a “normal man” was proportional to his height. His study sample, which would ultimately lead to the configuration of the BMI formula, was based only on white European men. In 1972, American physiologist Ancel Keys took Quetelet’s conclusions and used them to shape the calculation for body fat estimations.
According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, high BMIs are associated with greater risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, and high blood pressure. While the widely used indicator has been implemented to predetermine a person’s health and risk factors, the new AMA policy maintains that the metric is unjustly based on 19th century, white bodies.
Researchers’ findings concluded that the calculation does not consider how fat is stored in varying body types among diversified ethnic and racial groups, genders, and ages. The report cited that “healthy” Asian women’s risk for type 2 diabetes was double when compared to white women with the same BMI. Black and Hispanic women are also at greater risk for type 2 diabetes than white females with an identical BMI, but to a smaller degree than Asian women.
“South Asians, in particular, have especially high levels of body fat and are more prone to developing abdominal obesity [than whites], which may account for their very high risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” claimed the AMA. As opposed to solely revering BMI as the influential factor in one’s overall health, the AMA proposes the calculation be in combination with other effective measures of risk such as waist circumference, body composition, visceral fat, as well as metabolic and genetic factors.
“Numerous co-morbidities, lifestyle issues, gender, ethnicities, medically significant familial-determined mortality effectors, duration of time one spends in certain BMI categories and the expected accumulation of fat with aging are likely to significantly affect interpretation of BMI data, particularly in regard to morbidity and mortality rates,” said the AMA.
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