Doctors Are Exploring an Appealing Alternative to BMI

Measuring your own BMI is a very easy task, provided you know your height and weight. That’s made it a very conveinent way for doctors to analyze your health — even as a growing amount of evidence has cropped up to argue about its very real shortcomings. In 2009, NPR’s Keith Devlin offered 10 reasons why BMI shouldn’t be used as a gauge for fitness. And last year, Wajahat Mehal, MD of the Yale Metabolic Health & Weight Loss Program made the case against relying on BMI alone.

“BMI is just one data point, along with many others, that needs to be considered to determine a person’s health,” Dr. Mehal said. But if doctors aren’t going to use BMI, then what should they be using instead? Cue the body roundness index, which Roni Caryn Rabin chronicled in a recent New York Times article.

As the name suggests, the BRI measures how round a body is. It is measured using height, weight, and waist data — along with (in some cases) the hips. The Times reports that studies have shown that the BRI is good at forecasting health conditions for the people measured — both for those at the very high and very low ends of the index.

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“When BMI is used to frame risk, it often overestimates risk for muscular athletes, whereas it underestimates risk for older persons with muscle mass that’s been replaced by fat,” the co-author of a recent paper on BRI, told the Times. Given the role that visceral fat can play in one’s overall health, the BRI’s ability to factor this in offers a more specialized look at the body. And with critiques of the BMI abounding, it’s not hard to see the appeal of an alternative that addresses many of those criticisms.