Body mass index, obesity and health
The researchers are trying to find the definition of obesity by (a) using preclinical obesity, when a person has extra body fat but their organs work normally, and (b) clinical obesity’ Amide the rising buzz around Ozempic and similar weight-loss drugs’ the researchers are challenging the way obesity is defined and diagnosed, arguing that current methods fail to capture the complexity of the condition. They offer a more nuanced approach.
The researchers’ definition now focuses on how excess body fat, a measure called adiposity, affects the body, rather than ‘relying on body mass index (BMI)’ which links to person’s weight to their height. They propose two categories: preclinical obesity, when a person has extra body fat but their organs work normally, and clinical obesity, when excess fat harms the body’s organs and tissues.
This shift could improve clinical care, public health policies and societal attitudes toward obesity, according to an endocrinologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Now the idea is, eat less, move more, and you’ll lose weight. Although a healthy lifestyle is important, if it would be so simple, we wouldn’t have an epidemic, and this conception is an excellent contribution to the discussion about the complexity of obesity!
More than one billion people worldwide live with obesity, and the condition is linked to about 5 million deaths per year from disorders such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Because it is easy to measure and compare, BMI has long been used as a tool to diagnose obesity. But it doesn’t offer a full picture of a person’s health, because it doesn’t account for differences in body composition, such as muscle versus fat. For a person in the United States descent, obesity is typically defined as a BMI of 26.5 or higher which correlates with a high level of body fat. However, a muscular athlete might be labelled obese on the basis of BMI, whereas someone with a ‘normal’ BMI might have excess fat that increases their risk of heart problems or other serious health issues, according to Dr. Francesco Rubino, a bariatric surgeon at King College, London, who led the group proposing the new approach.
Conventional methods led to unnecessary treatment for some people while missing others who need help. To address this, this group proposes a system for diagnosing obesity that goes beyond BMI, combining it with other methods such a measuring waist circumference, which is a proxy for adiposity, or body scans using low-level X-rays, which can directly measure fat mass.
Although these isn’t a fixed threshold for obesity, body fat is typically considered to be in excess when it is above 25% in men and 30-38% in women. Because measuring adiposity directly might be impractical or costly, alternative health markers such as waist sizes, waist-to-hip ratio or waist-to-height ratio are important, according to the researchers. However, it’s safe to assume that a person with a BMI above 40 has high body fat.
Diagnosing obesity should also consider the results of standard laboratory tests, medical history, and information on daily activities to assess how excess body fat might affect a person’s health, according to Dr. Robert Eckel, an endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Medical School in Aurora. These are objective diagnostic criteria, they’re standardized across global health systems.