Wed 08/Oct/2025 – 06:28 AM
A new study, from the University of Waterlo, indicated that BMIAnd, which has been used as a standard health scale, may be misleading, and even harmful, as researchers found that the body mass index often mistakes in classifying the health condition of individuals, ignoring major factors such as muscle mass, fat distribution, and metabolic health.
BMI may cause health evaluation
According to what was published in the Times Now newspaper, the BMI was considered the primary criterion for measuring health, and this indicator helps to know everything about physical fitness, physical fitness and associated health problems.
Dr. Eli Billy, the main researcher in the study from the University of Waterloo, said: Consciousness is that the body mass index does not measure what many believe, and that the body mass index does not differentiate between muscles and fats, and he cannot identify the places of fat distribution in the body, ignoring other important factors such as age, sex and race, and two people can share the same body mass index but they have completely different health files.
According to scientists, these restrictions on the body mass index may have severe consequences, affecting the possibility of obtaining medical care, enhancing harmful stereotypes about what natural bodies are, as they contribute greatly to the consolidation of social stigma, where most people are classified on an ethnic basis, suffer from disabilities, the elderly, and their bodies are greater and large.
Billy said: What many people do not know is that the body mass index has never been determined to take into account health, but rather a statistical tool used to justify racist and anti -obesity ideas and other forms of discrimination, and soon became a measure of health, beauty and fitness, and it is believed that the body mass index was originally developed in the nineteenth century to determine the average man statistically, which makes it a measure depends on Height and weight.
The researchers suggested that the body mass index be used in conjunction with other standards of risks, such as visceral fats in the depth of the abdominal cavity, the obesity index in the body, based on the measurement of hip and length, the formation of the body, the percentage of fats, bones and muscles, and genetic and metabolic factors.
