New research published at this year’s European Congress on Obesity in Prague suggests that a piece of string can provide a more accurate measure of weight gain than the Body Mass Index (BMI). Currently most doctors use BMI to determine whether a patient is at risk of disease, but the use of BMI is becoming contentious as there is evidence that it can overestimate the danger posed to people who have a large muscle mass or a heavy bone structure.
Dr Margaret Ashwell of Oxford Brookes University, who led the study, has found that using a person’s waist-to-height ratio is a better predictor of a person’s risk of obesity and cardiovascular disease. Previous work by Ashwell has demonstrated that using only BMI and ignoring other measures of obesity, like the waist-to-height ratio, resulted in an incorrect classification of 10% of the UK population. More than one-quarter of these people were deemed to be of normal weight and not at risk. Many global studies have also concluded that a person is at lower cardiovascular risk if they keep their waist measurement to less than half their height measurement.
The results in this latest study showed that from a cohort of 2917 people aged 16 years and over, 12% of the total population would be missed by BMI screening, and over one-third of those classified as “normal” by BMI have a waist-to-height ratio exceeding 0.5. These...
