Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

While I do believe a generally healthy, active lifestyle is important, all this focus on just weight has over-simplified health to almost be detrimental. Your body can change it's mass and viable bulk for a wide range of reason other than body fat. Muscles add weight and bulk. Water from proper hydration adds weight and bulk. Winter adds weight and bulk (albeit the bad kind). Hell, I'd even imagine someone going hard on milk is some percentage heavier than average from their denser bones. BMI tries to compensate but still ends up doing a horrible job of correlating what ratio of your weight is actual dead weight, versus the weight of just more going on, and makes some skinny fat coach potato starving themselves on hot pockets look healthier than an Alaskan lumberjack who has to eat 5 meals a day to sustain the energy needed to throw 200 Ib logs around in the freezing cold.

Based on my experience looking at people, and what they are eating and doing on a day to day basis, conclusions from population wide BMI statistics are not affected by people who are too muscular or have high bone density.

The Alaskan lumberjack is not representative of the data. What is representative are people who do not sleep right, eat right, or exercise right for the purposes of preventing and delaying health issues.

I agree from a population wide standpoint even a simple glance at your local [crowded event] is enough to tell you the population at large trends toward unhealthy. My point though is that it's inadequate from an individual standpoint, which is the most important for said individual interested in maintaining their own health.

It's also interesting that you mention sleep, as that's a very important health factor that would barely present itself in any type of measurement based on weight.

The thing is BMI is intended to be a population level measurement and never meant for single individuals — the variations are just too much for it to be useful when applied to the general population individually.

It is useful for individuals. People don’t realize they’re overweight anymore, because everybody else is. BMI tells them an objective opinion that doesn’t change with the times. It is useful because its inaccuracy is small compared to how overweight people are.

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