What is BMI

BMI is the two-digit number that medical professionals use to determine how expansive your butt is. Anything higher than 30 means you are obese. BMI is a simple formula calculated based on height and weight.

It was created by the World Health Organization's International Obesity Task Force (IOTF). During 1997, following two years of study, the IOTF lowered the "overweight" cutoff to 25 from its previous value of 27. As a general rule, anyone attempting to define a human being in two digits leaves much to be desired.
A new study finds that about 54 million Americans who are labeled as obese or overweight according to their body mass index are actually healthy.
Body mass index is calculated by dividing a person's weight by the square of the person's height. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a "healthy" BMI is 18.5 to 24.9, an overweight BMI is 25 to 29.9 and an obese BMI is 30 or higher. Over time, researchers have begun to suspect that people with so-called healthy BMIs can be very unhealthy and those with high BMIs can actually be in very good shape. According to his BMI, 34.3, the Dwayne The Rock Johnson is obese.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently proposed rules that would allow employers to penalize employees for up to 30% of their health insurance costs if they do not meet 24 health criteria, which include meeting a specific BMI. If BMI does not accurately reflect health, then those with high numbers potentially could be overcharged for no reason.
To find out whether BMI correlated with actual markers of health, a team of UCLA researchers analyzed data from 40,420 individuals who participated in the 2005-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They looked at individuals' blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, glucose, insulin resistance and C-reactive protein data — markers that are linked to heart disease and inflammation, among other issues.
They found that 47.4%, of overweight people and 29% of obese people were, from a metabolic standpoint, quite healthy. They also found more than 30% of individuals with "normal" weights were metabolically unhealthy.

Their results showed that using BMI as the primary indicator of health means that 74.9 million adults in the United States are being mis-categorized as healthy or unhealthy. That includes the 34.4 million people who are considered overweight and the 19.8 million people considered obese, according to BMI.