Study: BMI Not An Accurate Measure of Metabolic Health

Body mass index (BMI), despite being widely used as a determinant of health, is an inaccurate measure of cardiometabolic health, according to a recent report.

In response to a proposed rule from the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that would allow employers to raise health insurance costs of employees who fail to meet specified BMI, researchers aimed to examine whether a measure of cardiometabolic health based on BMI could lead to misclassifications.
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Researchers collected blood pressure, triglyceride, cholesterol, glucose, insulin resistance, and C-reactive protein data from 40,420 participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and stratified them according to BMI.

Overall, they found that nearly half of the participants who were considered overweight and 29% of those considered obese based on their BMI had healthy cardiometabolic measures, as did 16% of those with BMI over 35.

Further, over 30% of those with healthy BMI measurements were found to be cardiometabolically unhealthy.

“Using BMI categories as the main indicator of health, an estimated 74 936 678 US adults are misclassified as cardiometabolically unhealthy or cardiometabolically healthy,” researchers concluded.

“Policymakers should consider the unintended consequences of relying solely on BMI, and researchers should seek to improve diagnostic tools related to weight and cardiometabolic health.”

—Michael Potts

Reference:

Tomiyama AJ, Hunger JM, Nguyen-Cuu J, Wells C. Misclassification of cardiometabolic health when using body mass index categories in nhanes 2005–2012. International Journal of Obesity. 2016 February 4 [epub ahead of print]. doi: 10.1038/ijo.2016.17.