- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Unless accompanied by a measure of body fat (e.g. Body Fat Percentage (BFP)), BMI is indeed a measure of limited utility. BMI makes no distinction between salutary body mass and deleterious body mass. If one is active - not a professional athlete, but someone who keeps workout trim - it is quite easy to become overweight according to the BMI scale. The BMI scale works for people who are sendentary; it does not give a proper assessment of people who are active. Most people who work out will look like sprinters (usual body type - muscular), and not marathon runners (usual body type - slender).
It thus follows that BMI is useful only as a second measurement. The first measurement taken should be the BFP - "How fat are you - are you mostly muscle or mostly fat?" The BMI can then be taken as a second measurement which will confirm or deny the findings of the BFP measurement.
