![]() It does so by dividing your weight in kilograms by your height in meters squared.Īs a result, you've probably seen BMI calculators all over the Internet, simply requiring you to fill in your weight and height - and voila, they spit out a so-called picture of your health as represented by a single number. If you think it sounds a bit odd that we use an archaic system not developed by a doctor and certainly not taking into account that different people, races and sexes have different body types, you’re right.īMI is currently used by medical professionals as a quick assessment of whether or not a person is a healthy weight, based on an estimation of body fat percentage. Today, almost two centuries from its inception, everyone from family doctors to insurance companies still refer to BMI as a sort of first-line assessment of health, leading to higher insurance premiums and reductive doctor visits for people outside of the size of the "average man" in the 1830s, among other problems. The Quetelet Index became known as the Body Mass Index (BMI) when Ancel Keys, a physiologist (and also not a medical professional), stated that it was essential to quantifying health on an individual level. ![]() It was designed to look at a pattern of deaths among a large population, as opposed to evaluate any one person's size or health.įast forward to 1972. Quetelet’s goal was to study average human physical characteristics, in order to understand why so many people were dying, in case there was a correlation between weight, height and death. At the time, actuaries were reporting high death rates. If that sounds biased and dicey, it's because it is.
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