The American Medical Association is now advising doctors to focus less on Body Mass Index when it comes to overall health. Doctors have traditionally used BMI as an important metric — if it was too high or too low a patient was considered unhealthy.
“Under the newly adopted policy, the AMA recognizes issues with using BMI as a measurement due to its historical harm, its use for racist exclusion and because BMI is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations,” the organization said in a statement on Wednesday.
Thomas Sherman, professor of Pharmacology & Physiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, told WTOP there are more accurate ways of measuring the risk between body weight and health, including waist-to-hip ratio and waist circumference, which are more predictive of cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk.
Still, he said, weight matters.
“The concept that there is a healthy obese, or a healthy overweight is just simply not true.”
But, he said, there are different degrees of health within each body weight category.
He advised doctors to take a more holistic approach and have a conversation with their patients that isn’t focused only on weight loss.
“Let’s look at your activity level. Let’s look at your diet. Let’s look at how well you’re sleeping. All of those things impact your health just as much as BMI does,” he said.
In its updated guidance, the AMA advises doctors to use BMI “in conjunction with other valid measures of risk such as, but not limited to, measurements of visceral fat, body adiposity index, body composition, relative fat mass, waist circumference and genetic/metabolic factors.”
According to the National Institutes of Health, a BMI between 20 and 25 is considered normal weight.
