(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – The most prominent US doctors’ organization declared that the “Body Mass Index” (BMI) is a “racist” measurement based on 19th-century white bodies and should be abandoned.
According to the American Medical Association (AMA), the primary metric for a healthy body weight has been an instrument for “racist exclusion,” which fails to account for diverse body compositions based on sex and race.
“Our AMA recognizes: the issues with using body mass index (BMI) as a measurement because: (a) of the eugenics behind the history of BMI, (b) of the use of BMI for racist exclusion, and (c) BMI cutoffs are based on the imagined ideal Caucasian and does not consider a person’s gender or ethnicity,” stated the AMA Council on Science and Public Health, as cited by The Daily Mail.
The report points out that body mass index is measured by dividing a person’s weight by the square of height, adding that it was “devised by a white man considering white bodies.”
It adds that the inventor of BMI, Belgian mathematician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, wanted to measure the average weight and height using a “sample of white, European men.”
It is noted that BMI doesn’t take into account how fat is stored in the human.
Thus, Asians with a supposedly “healthy” index still face a high risk of diabetes, while black and white women store fat in different body parts and have different health threats.
As per the AMA’s new recommendations, physicians should measure visceral fat found around organs, as well as a body’s “percentage of fat, bone, and muscle in one’s body, and genetic and metabolic factors such as abnormal blood sugar levels.”
The AMA said BMI could remain useful for a “macro-level view” of the population’s overall health. Still, it couldn’t predict individual disease risks, especially in different ethnic and racial groups.
Even though a BMI of 25 or higher indicates a high risk of type 2 diabetes, in Asian people, the number is 20.
Moreover, since black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans’ prevalence of diabetes is two-to-four times higher than in whites, the BMI could lead to “under-diagnosis” of the disease.
