Tag: BMI

BMI and the Obesity Epidemic

Obesity is a serious and growing health problem worldwide. Ditching BMI as a measure of obesity is not the solution.

/ June 14, 2017

The Obesity Paradox

Being fat is bad except when it’s good. It’s called “the obesity paradox.” (No, that isn’t a mis-spelling for “two physicians who treat fat people.”) The adverse health effects of obesity are well established, but there are exceptions. Obesity appears to confer an advantage in certain subgroups with conditions like heart disease and diabetes. In the News Casual consumers of some recent...

/ September 25, 2012

Does Weight Matter?

Determining the net health effects of independent factors can be tricky, especially when those factors cannot be controlled for in experimental studies. For things like body mass index (BMI) we must rely on observational data and triangulate with multiple studies to isolate the contributions from BMI. But it can be done. The data, however, are likely to be complex and noisy, and...

/ September 28, 2011