The main diagnostic test for obesity — the body mass index — accounts for only height and weight, leaving out a slew of factors that influence body fat and health.

The main diagnostic test for obesity — the body mass index — accounts for only height and weight, leaving out a slew of factors that influence body fat and health.

  • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
    3·
    1 year ago

    You should have kept reading about BMI.

    This isn’t about speculative genertc factors it’s about medical boards arguing that the thresholds need to be set differently for these populations.

    Use lower BMI thresholds as a practical measure of overweight and obesity in people with a South Asian, Chinese, other Asian, Middle Eastern, Black African or African-Caribbean family background, as they are prone to central adiposity and their cardiometabolic risk occurs at lower BMI:

    https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/obesity/diagnosis/identification-classification/

    Similarly, new Zealand used to have higher thresholds for obesity for Maori and Polynesian (which includes Samoa), but because a range of issues including diabetes is such a problem for these populations they brought it back down. It still doesn’t work reliably as a risk factor for a range of stuff.

    https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-bmi-inconsistent-obesity-maori-pacific.html