Did you get your BMI checked during your latest visit to the doctor? A recent study concluded that waist to hip ratio is a better indicator of health than BMI.
The study published in the JAMA journal, found that wait to hip ratio serves as a better, simpler and clearer indicator of health than BMI.
This information comes as a contradictory conclusion to the age-old finding of BMI being a better indicator of physical health. Body mass index or the BMI was said to be a controversial tool for measuring health and screening for chronic issues such as obesity. Several experts indicated that the conclusion could be unreliable due to the long-term accuracy of BMI.
The researchers studied around 400,000 individuals and found that wait to hip ratio had a better association with mortality than BMI. The researchers looked at the adverse health outcomes related to waist to hip ratio.
The health outcomes included cancer, cardiovascular diseases and death. The researchers concluded that their finding was significant for the doctors’ office as the use of this ratio than BMI could help in measuring health more accurately.
It will result in better health outcomes than relying on BMI, moreover, the assessment of adiposity would be better through waist to hip ratio. The finding was in support of the existing evidence stating that clinical use of the ratio should be promoted than BMI.
As per WHO, a moderate WHR for men is < 0.9 whereas, for women it is < 0.85. Moreover, it was highlighted that BMI does not measure fat distribution accurately which can throw off the diagnosis of a health condition.
Experts have noted that BMI may not be an ethnically-friendly way of measuring health. Moreover, as it cannot differentiate between muscular weight and may still categorize people as obese.
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