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Researchers have long faulted the body mass index as an unreliable indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.
Move over, body mass index. Make room for roundness — to be precise, the body roundness index.
The body mass index, or B.M.I., is a ratio of height to weight that has long been used as a medical screening tool. It is one of the most widely used health metrics but also one of the most reviled, because it is used to label people overweight, obese or extremely obese.
The classifications have been questioned by athletes like the American Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher, whose B.M.I. of 30 technically puts her on the cusp of obesity. “But alas,” she said on Instagram, addressing online trolls who tried to shame her about her weight, “I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not.”
Advocates for overweight individuals and people of color note that the formula was developed nearly 200 years ago and based exclusively on data from men, most of them white, and that it was never intended for medical screening. A Black nutritionist once called it the “bull**** measure index.”
Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.
“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.
“But as soon as you measured his waist, you’d see, ‘Oh, it’s 32 inches.’”
So welcome a new metric: the body roundness index. B.R.I. is just what it sounds like — a measure of how round or circlelike you are, using a formula that takes into account height and waist, but not weight.