Tuesday, July 27, 2010

BMI: Body Mass Idiocy

I get daily emails/updates from the Center of Consumer Freedom, which is an organization that is devoted to promoting personal responsibility and protecting consumer choices. They also have pro-ag/pro-food messages, so I like them. I had to share their most recent article on BMI: Body Mass Index, ehrr I mean Idiocy because it made me laugh. Pretty comforting when I think of my own BMI (thank you state government for calling me overweight).

BMI is a simplistic measure that only combines height and weight—ignoring muscle mass—which leads to erroneous classifications. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cast doubt on its usefulness. So it wasn’t surprising to read yesterday that the British National Health Service (NHS), which measures schoolchildren’s BMI and sends “warning letters” to parents of supposedly “overweight” kids, has made a number of big fat screw-ups.

Who else falls into the BMI trap? Today’s CCF infographic presents a few famous “fatsos”—at least according to the their BMI. Be sure to check out our complete list of supposedly flabby folks.

3 comments:

crystal.cattle said...

This is really interesting. I alway thought BMI seemed a little bit misleading. By the way I love your new design. Where do you find all these great looks!

Kelsey Pope said...

Hey Crystal, thanks! My sister-in-law took the picture and I just put my title on it with a design. Blogger has a ton of new layout designs and you can customize the size of the text column and the side columns, and rearrange things. You should play around with it...I'm not set on this one yet, but it will do for now. :)

Anonymous said...

haha... that's funny. Yeah in college I was border line overweight with that BMI but wasn't quite there. Now I'm considered overweight... but those guys they listed... yeah that's just plain stupid. Wonder what they think about weight lifters!