{"id":831637,"date":"2026-11-11T22:52:13","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T22:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/831637\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T22:52:13","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T22:52:13","slug":"move-over-bmi-new-obesity-definition-is-better-for-predicting-your-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/831637\/","title":{"rendered":"Move over BMI: new obesity definition is better for predicting your health"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

A study suggests that people are being misdiagnosed as having obesity with a metric known as the body mass index (BMI).Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds\/AFP\/Getty <\/p>\n

Clinicians have debated for years<\/a> whether body mass index (BMI) \u2014 a metric derived from a person\u2019s height and weight \u2014 is the best way to define and diagnose obesity<\/a>. Now, an approach that measures waist circumference and focuses more closely on excess body fat has proved to be better than BMI at predicting a person\u2019s risk of death.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

New obesity definition sidelines BMI to focus on health<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

An analysis of data collected from more than 800,000 individuals found that using BMI to diagnose obesity failed to identify a considerable proportion of people with elevated health risks caused by excess body fat. The study was published today in Nature1<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Physicians know that BMI \u2014 calculated by dividing a person\u2019s weight by the square of their height \u2014 doesn\u2019t accurately reflect body composition. For example, a muscular person might have an elevated BMI but have little body fat. The latest study \u201creinforces that BMI is not a good measure of obesity at the individual level and is not good in terms of predicting who is going to develop cardiometabolic disease in the long term,\u201d says C\u00e1tia Martins, an obesity researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.<\/p>\n

But given how simple it is to calculate BMI, it remains the most widely used tool to classify obesity.<\/p>\n

Waist matters<\/p>\n

A person is usually diagnosed with obesity if they have a BMI of 30 or higher. The approach presented in the study \u2014 called the combined anthropometric definition of obesity, or CAD-obesity \u2014 goes beyond BMI, combining it with measures, such as waist circumference, that are linked to excess body fat. Physicians know that when fat tissue is preferentially stored in the abdominal area, it is associated with more negative health consequences than when it\u2019s stored elsewhere, Martins says.<\/p>\n

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Why BMI is flawed \u2014 and how to redefine obesity<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Under the CAD-obesity system2<\/a>, first proposed last yea<\/a>r, people with obesity who also have at least one of 18 specific health problems \u2014 including heart failure and sleep apnoea \u2014 are classified as having \u2018clinical obesity\u2019. This indicates that excess fat is harming their organs and tissues. Those with obesity, but without any of these health problems, are classified as having \u2018preclinical obesity\u2019, in which a person has excess fat but their organs are functioning normally.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did not know until now whether or not this new framework had implications in the real world and a prognostic value,\u201d says Francesco Rubino, a weight-loss surgeon at King\u2019s College London who led the effort to create the new system and is a co-author of the Nature paper.<\/p>\n

But Rubino and his colleagues proved the system\u2019s worth by examining medical records from four large groups of people in China, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. They used data from three of those cohorts, in which more than 50,000 deaths occurred over up to 15 years, to determine whether BMI or the new system was a better indicator of elevated mortality risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A study suggests that people are being misdiagnosed as having obesity with a metric known as the body…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":831638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[5589,59,102,4230,5898,4231,236,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-831637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-epidemiology","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-medical-research","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-obesity","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/831638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}