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The American Medical Association (AMA) has suggested that body mass index (BMI), a measurement typically used to determine if someone is healthy, has “racist” roots.
According to a newly issued policy from AMA’s Council on Science & Public Health, BMI is “indirect and imperfect” due to its historically harmful use for “racist exclusion,” per the New York Post. The measurement doesn’t “appropriately represent racial and ethnic minorities” because it’s based on “the imagined ideal Caucasian” of the 19th century, AMA said.
BMI originated in the late 1800s after Belgian mathematician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet found that the body weight of a “normal man” was proportional to his height. Quetelet, however, only studied European white men.
Still, in 1972, American physiologist Ancel Keys used Quetelet’s findings to create a calculation to estimate body fat. In the U.S., BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in pounds by the person’s height in inches, then multiplying that number by 703.
High BMIs have long been connected to an increased risk for health disorders including heart disease, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers. However, AMA has found that BMI isn’t an effective health indicator as the measurement doesn’t account for how fat is stored in different body types across racial and ethnic groups, sexes, genders, and ages, among other factors.
For example, researchers have determined that white women are typically “apple-shaped and carry more weight around their waist, meaning they are more at risk for health disorders than those with “pear-shaped” bodies, which are commonly found among Black women.
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