Who invented bmi chart

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, devised it in the s. It aims to estimate whether a person has a healthy weight by dividing their weight in kilograms kg by their height in meters m squared. When Quetelet devised the BMI formula, there were no computers, calculators, or electronic devices, so he developed a simple system.

Now, some people argue, we have technology that can help us add some complexity to the calculation. After all, people are three-dimensional, not two-dimensional, and healthy bodies grow in different shapes and sizes.

Trefethen argued that the formula leads to confusion and misinformation. The height term, he says, divides the weight by too much when people are short and by too little when they are tall. The result is that short people think they are thinner than they really are, while tall people think they are fatter than they are.

You can try it here. Trefethen points out that any calculation that assigns one number to a person will not be perfect. Humans are too complex to be described by a single figure. However, he believes this new calculation gives a closer approximation to the reality of human shape and size. Consider that a person who does no exercise; is 1.

An Olympic athlete who is 1. However, muscle is about 18 percent more dense than fat, so this is clearly not true. Still, Trefethen points out that if muscle is 18 percent denser than fat, a person who exercised enough to convert 10 percent of their fat into muscle would still increase their BMI by just 1.

This study took body measurements from 7, men from five different countries. During this time, he analyzed their subcutaneous fat thickness and adiposity-body density. For these reasons, BMI has become popular with researchers and the government to monitor health risks in the United States.

The NIH originally had broad categories for body mass index. That standard has been in use to the current day. Over the years, the cut-off values for obesity have become more stringent. In turn, many more people have been labeled as obese and overweight. However, BMI is only an estimate of adipose tissue in the body. These indexes cannot differentiate fat from muscle in the body.

In some populations, the BMI can be inaccurate. However, BMI is simple to use and often the preferred method to measure obesity. People come in all different shapes and sizes.

They grow at different rates. Association between WC and health risks is not an easy task and should be done scientifically using proper techniques. Body mass index - BMI. History BMI is very easy to measure and calculate and is therefore the most commonly used tool to correlate risk of health problems with the weight at population level. WHO child growth standards. BMI-for-age years. Now, this is not what we really observe.

The increase of weight is slower, except during the first year after birth; then the proportion we have just pointed out is pretty regularly observed. But after this period, and until near the age of puberty, weight increases nearly as the square of the height. The development of weight again becomes very rapid at puberty, and almost stops after the twenty-fifth year. In general, we do not err much when we assume that during development the squares of the weight at different ages are as the fifth powers of the height; which naturally leads to this conclusion, in supporting the specific gravity constant, that the transverse growth of man is less than the vertical.

By the early s it was clear that illnesses were in some way linked to excessive body fat , something that greatly interested actuaries who were seeing more and more claims come in for their obese policy holders.

The growing number of claimants led Louis I. Dublin, vice president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and himself a statistician, to search for a means of classifying those at a higher risk.

Dublin was the first to lead the development of tables of normal weights, based on the average weights recorded for a given height. As Dublin collected more and more data he was faced with a very wide no pun intended range of weights for persons of the same sex and height.