Move over BMI .Welcome BRI(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Move over BMI .Welcome BRI
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/health/body-roundness-index-bmi.html
11 comments
Perfect is the enemy of great.
Oh no BMI gives weird results for 2% of the population, who by the way are acutely attuned to their bodies, so let's throw the whole thing out.
Health professionals need a polite way to start obesity conversations with patients and BMI gives them that. When you focus on the very narrow shortcomings of BMI you actually harm obese people by giving them a reason to disregard concrete measurements of their obesity.
Oh no BMI gives weird results for 2% of the population, who by the way are acutely attuned to their bodies, so let's throw the whole thing out.
Health professionals need a polite way to start obesity conversations with patients and BMI gives them that. When you focus on the very narrow shortcomings of BMI you actually harm obese people by giving them a reason to disregard concrete measurements of their obesity.
Why would we bring in this new metric which does not seem like a significant improvement, when we have other tools to measure our health regardless of physical representation?
Because this is a measurement which can be applied across genders and ethnicities which peer-reviewed science shows is directly linked to health outcomes.
It is suggested that's better than the previous method which compared everyone to white males born in the 1700s.
Sorry if you're a bit round. Many people are these days. That's the problem!
It is suggested that's better than the previous method which compared everyone to white males born in the 1700s.
Sorry if you're a bit round. Many people are these days. That's the problem!
What other tools are you thinking of? My understanding is that waist circumference is one of the better predictors of all cause mortality.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... gives the actual formula in "BRI Definition " for the curious.
(wonder if they needed to specify the unit in the first place since lengthes end up being divided together. Maybe to avoid people using different units for height and waist length?)
(wonder if they needed to specify the unit in the first place since lengthes end up being divided together. Maybe to avoid people using different units for height and waist length?)
They've always said my BMI was high even when I've had very little body fat. I just have naturally larger, denser muscles.
belt and road initiative? so true
BMI is important, and correct
> The paper’s authors suggested the lower scores, seen mostly in those 65 and older, might have reflected malnutrition, muscle atrophy or inactivity.
> “B.M.I. cannot distinguish body fat from muscle mass,” Wenquan Niu, who works at the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at the Capital Institute of Pediatrics in Beijing and was a senior author of the paper, wrote in an email. “For any given B.M.I., fat distribution and body composition can vary dramatically.”
So, if I understand it right, BMI cannot distinguish body fat from muscle mass and BRI can’t distinguish malnutrition or inactivity. This would mean that whichever metric you choose, you should look at it as well as beyond it.
On the same topic, the formula for BMI is a simple one (weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) that you could calculate it on a simple calculator.
The formula for BRI is more complex: [1]
> BRI was calculated as 364.2 − 365.5 × √(1 − [waist circumference in centimeters / 2π]² / [0.5 × height in centimeters]²), according to the formula developed by Thomas et al.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...