The American Medical Association has now deemed that body mass index (BMI) is racist because it was based on the ideal caucasian when it was developed.
Here’s more via the Daily Mail:
A leading US medical organization is urging doctors to ditch body mass index (BMI) as the primary measurement for a healthy bodyweight, citing its ‘racist’ roots.
The American Medical Association, the largest organization of doctors in the US, said the metric has been used for ‘racist exclusion’ and fails to consider differences in body composition that vary based on race and sex.
Body mass index (BMI), devised by a white man considering white bodies, is measured by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms or pounds by the square of height in meters or feet, and it has been deeply ingrained in the medical system as a way to measure population health more broadly.
But on an individual level, BMI does not take into consideration relative body shape and how fat is stored. For instance, Asian people who fall within a ‘healthy’ BMI range are still at a high risk of diabetes.
The AMA Council on Science and Public Health said: ‘Our AMA recognizes: the issues with using body mass index (BMI) as a measurement because: (a) of the eugenics behind the history of BMI, (b) of the use of BMI for racist exclusion, and (c) BMI cutoffs are based on the imagined ideal Caucasian and does not consider a person’s gender or ethnicity.’
The medical body voted last week to recommend that physicians take into consideration more than the ratio of a person’s height to their weight, instead measure a person’s visceral fat (considered to be the riskiest type that accumulates around the organs), the percentage of fat, bone, and muscle in one’s body, and genetic and metabolic factors such as abnormal blood sugar levels.
It may not be perfect but calling it ‘racist’ just seems highly political to me, with two out of the three bullet points in their justification for this being about race.
I wonder if this vote to abandon BMI is also about normalizing the ‘full figured’ women of our day. We’ve certainly seen them on the front of more magazines as those pushing this narrative want everyone to believe this is acceptable. Changing the rules like this for doctors could be to excuse away some of these women who are fat but not morbidly obese.