It’s hard enough to convince people with eating disorders that they are in a state of malnutrition as it is. Apologies to any leeches who are actually wonderful healers.) (I actually don’t know very much at all about leech therapy, so I shouldn’t judge. I imagine that if your doctor started trying to put leeches on you every time you got a fever you’d run a mile. It’s like using leeches to treat a fever - might have seemed like a good idea before we knew better, but now we know better. The reason I get riled up about this is because something that absolutely should not be used as a measure of health is the most commonly bloody used measure of health for people in recovery from life-threatening restrictive eating disorders. It’s like a fly that won’t go away no matter how many times you bang your head against the wall. Most medical practitioners seem to know deep down that BMI isn’t really a reliable indication of health, yet they still pull out that dumb chart and trace lines along it. That’s because the human body is an organism not a fucking math equation. Oh, and not to mention that very same data shows that nearly half of the people classified as “obese” by the BMI standard were perfectly metabolically healthy, actually. You can be the exact same height and BMI as someone else and have very different bodies. Ironically, although the CDC uses BMI as a measure of health, the CDC’s own data show that BMI measures are inaccurate at determining … well, just about anything really.
And guess who is responsible for turning the Quetelet Index into “Body Mass Index?” None other than our old pal Ancel Keys, whom I have a love-hate relationship with, as although Keys is responsible for the misguided war on fat (for which I will always be cross with him), he also did the Minnesota Starvation Study. It is nonsensical in a scientific sense, as it makes no allowance for the relative proportions of a person’s muscle, bone, and fat. “Get to a BMI 19 and you’ll be healthy,” they tell us.īody Mass Index (BMI) is a very basic, and arguably erroneous, way to estimate the amount of fat that a person has on their body based on their height and weight.Įven the bloke who invented BMI (Adolphe Quetelet who published his “Quetelet Index” in 1832) said that it should not be used as a measure of fat on a person’s body.
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