BMI standards are ‘racist’: American Medical Association

[Kamaji]

BMI standards are ‘racist’: American Medical Association

By Asia Grace
June 20, 2023

Weight, what?

The American Medical Association, or the AMA, the largest organization of doctors in the U.S., is ready to say “goodbye” to determining healthy body weight solely by BMI, owing to the measurement’s inherently “racist” roots.

Body mass index, or BMI — which physicians have used to measure body fatness and predict obesity-related health risks for 200 years — is “indirect and imperfect” due to its historically harmful use for “racist exclusion,” per newly issued policy via the AMA Council on Science and Public Health.

The report found that “BMI does not appropriately represent racial and ethnic minorities” because it’s based on “the imagined ideal Caucasian” of the 19th century, and does not consider a person’s gender or ethnicity.

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Source:  https://nypost.com/2023/06/20/bmi-standards-are-racist-american-medical-association/

[Kamaji]

Good Grief!!!

No, they aren't racist.  They're simply incorrect, incomplete, and not particularly useful.

Geez.

[mountaineer]

Apparently, the AMA is taking after Planned Parenthood's founder Margaret Sanger in wanting black people dead.

[DB]

So is there evidence obese people "of color" have fewer health issues than obese people that are lacking color?

[bigheadfred]

I read the headline as BLM standards are ‘racist’ and thought "I don' t need a doctor to tell me that". 

[Wingnut]

So is there evidence obese people "of color" have fewer health issues than obese people that are lacking color?

Not if you subtract Diabetes, strokes, Hypertension and sickle cell trait.

[PeteS in CA]

The BMI shtick is invalid, but racism is not the reason. Apparently it was developed for late 19th Century Belgian soldiers. Need I point out that Germans, Italians, blacks, Slavs, Scandinavians, Han Chinese, yada, yada, yada have very different ethnic heritages from Belgians? Need I point out that nutrition - contrary to food faddists' claims - and health/hygiene have improved considerable in the past century and a half?

[Kamaji]

The BMI shtick is invalid, but racism is not the reason. Apparently it was developed for late 19th Century Belgian soldiers. Need I point out that Germans, Italians, blacks, Slavs, Scandinavians, Han Chinese, yada, yada, yada have very different ethnic heritages from Belgians? Need I point out that nutrition - contrary to food faddists' claims - and health/hygiene have improved considerable in the past century and a half?

[jmyrlefuller]

This seems more like an ad hominem attack on the index rather than a critique of the index itself.

The index is inherently flawed mainly because it is skewed to favor shorter people. It's based upon the formula of weight divided by height squared. But that's a huge problem: someone with the same body proportions who is taller will register a higher BMI than someone who is shorter with the same proportions to scale, because body volume is a cubed quantity, height times width times length. For that reason, a lot of the health industry has moved to a more direct measure of proportions like waist-to-height ratio, which seems to be more accurate.

[Smokin Joe]

So is there evidence obese people "of color" have fewer health issues than obese people that are lacking color?

Yes. We should all push for transparency.

[mountaineer]

https://twitter.com/doc_gero/status/1670852326293409793

[rangerrebew]

OPINION US NEWS
Woke American Medical Association Now Says This Simple Doctor's Tool Is Racist
Johnathan Jones, The Western Journal   By Johnathan Jones, The Western Journal
Published June 22, 2023 at 6:15pm
 
The “woke” American Medical Association would like to see the world do away with a standard measuring tool that Americans have used for years to gauge whether they are at a healthy weight.

The largest collective of physicians has called on the body mass index value to be replaced with an alternative, citing its “racist” roots.


The BMI has been used in some form or another for two centuries by people across the globe to gauge whether they are over or underweight.
 
The scale takes into an individual’s height and weight and assigns them a score that is generally considered a good jumping-off point to a longer life.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/woke-american-medical-association-now-says-simple-doctors-tool-racist

[PeteS in CA]

As was discussed in this thread, https://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php/topic,503381.0.html , the whole BMI thing is utter BS. Putting it simply, the human race is more complex than 19th Century Belgian army soldiers.

[DefiantMassRINO]

Morbid obesity and Type 2 Diabetes don't lie.

[Smokin Joe]

I'd have to cut a leg off to fit the BMI for normal at my height. It really makes no allowance for bone structure, density, or stature.