March 1st, 2007

It’s reasonable to think there are problems with BMI

By Eric Moskowitz

Re: “Sarah”’s comment on my latest piece …

Though he has drawn much fire, Paul Campos has questioned the use of BMI:

To be sure, even if the BMI categories can be spectacularly wrong in cases such as those involving professional athletes, they’re often a pretty good indicator of how “fat” most people are in everyday life. The real question is whether being fat–as determined by the BMI or by any other measure–is actually a health risk. To answer this question, it’s necessary to examine the epidemiological evidence.

A number of prominent medical researchers wrote letters to TNR disagreeing with his essay, but he responded convincingly, to me at least.

The problem with the above for our purposes is that they center around issues of fatness. My latest column concerns people who are extremely underweight. You may have a good point, Sarah, but that seems to rest on whether there is a study regarding how good a health indicator BMI is for extremely underweight people.

If there indeed is such a study, I would have assumed that the New York City Council might have cited it as a justification for Resolution 692. They didn’t. Either the Council failed to include a crucial piece of evidence for their case in the Resolution, or that evidence doesn’t exist.

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