BMI & Being Healthy

  Most people will be familiar with the concept of BMI (body mass index) and how it results in labels such as underweight, healthy/normal, overweight etc. Many people take the result as a sign of health, with those falling into underweight, overweight, and obese being unhealthy and only those with the label healthy/normal are as the label suggests. New research is showing that the index results in many people being incorrectly labelled unhealthy due to being classed as overweight. The study carried out by psychologists from UCLA found that based on other tests of health such as; blood pressure and cholesterol levels, many people classed as overweight were in fact healthy. Conversely many people classed as healthy by their BMI were in fact unhealthy based on other health indicators. This research adds to a growing view that BMI should not be used on its own as an indicator of health. One of the co-authors of the paper suggests that focus shouldn’t be on people’s weight but rather on eating healthily and undertaking regular exercise. WOLPERT, Stuart., 4/2/16. Don’t use body mass index to determine whether people are healthy, UCLA-led study says. UCLA Newsroom. Online, Available at: <http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/dont-use-body-mass-index-to-determine-whether-people-are-healthy-ucla-led-study-says>, Accessed on [9/2/16].