If you frantically check your body mass index, better known by the abbreviation BMI — despite its well-known flaws — you’ll want to pay attention to the Mayo Clinic’s latest measurement system.
The new system, called the Body Volume Indicator (aka BVI), takes into account your body volume in relation to your abdomen’s volume, reports Business Insider. Body mass index estimates how much body fat you have based on your height and weight, but some people who are lean but weigh more because they have lots of muscle can be mischaracterized as overweight. The fact BMI doesn’t consider abdominal fat presents a snag in the traditional body fat-measuring method.
In one study, more than 30 percent of people who had “healthy” BMIs actually suffered from cardiometabolic health issues like hypertension and high cholesterol. Business Insider points out that studies have linked a large amount of abdominal fat with a higher risk for heart disease and diabetes. People who have BMIs greater than 25 are seen as overweight.
Mayo Clinic’s new method has a complementary app that allows people to track their BVIs through images of themselves from both the side and the front. It can also be determined manually, Business Insider reports.
But these aren’t the only ways of measuring body composition.
“My advice to patients is to get a good body composition scale for home use,” San Diego bariatric surgeon Dr. Julie Ellner recently told U.S. News. “It will calculate body fat percentage and will give credit to the patients who work out and are above-average healthy, while putting those who are at a ‘good weight’ but are unhealthy on notice that they need to change their program.”
People can also look to their waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio as ways to examine body composition. For example, if a woman’s waist circumference is more than 35 inches, that’s an indicator of abdominal obesity, according to the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The same goes for men at 40 inches.
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Here’s a Way to Check Your Weight Without BMI originally appeared on usnews.com
