For many years, medical professionals have used the body mass index or BMI, to measure whether we are overweight or not. This is important as a high BMI can mean you are prone to many diseases and can lead to an early death. However, it has recently come under more and more scrutiny as to whether there is a better method of measuring obesity. The BMI is easy to calculate if you know your height and weight. If you have a BMI under 25, you are judged to be of being in the normal range. A reading of 30 or over indicates a person is obese. But is this an accurate assessment?
If we take professional sportsmen and women as examples, many of them will not have much, if any, fat on them, but they would fail a BMI test. This is because they would have a high muscle content in their body. Muscle weighs more than fat and therefore leads to an erroneous result. A survey of professional international rugby players who are extremely fit would all fail a BMI assessment.
So, is there another way to assess whether we are overweight or even obese? The new preferred method adopted by many professional medical people is called the body fat percentage or BFP. It has been found to be more accurate than the BMI. The problem with measuring body fat is that it is more time-consuming and therefore more expensive to perform. It relies on sending a weak electrical charge through the body and measuring the circumference of the waist.
Fat and muscle have different amounts of water content within them. Therefore, the electrical current can measure this and differentiate between the two. The electrical charge moves through muscle more easily than through fatty tissue. Combined with the waist measurement, it gives a more accurate assessment of your likelihood of developing weight-related diseases. This new procedure is called bioelectrical impedance analysis or BIA.
No analysis is perfect and will give you a 100% analysis of what you will suffer from and an early death. However, a 15-year analysis showed that 27% of men and 44% of women were 78% more likely to die early if their body-fat levels were high. So, everyone should be aware of this and take action through their medical examiner.
John Pullen 