What is your Body Mass Index?
Long before the world new of the body mass
index, its predecessor was developed by a Belgium during the early to mid
1800’s. The world’s first BMI was developed by Adolphe Quetelet during his
development of the theory of social physics, in which he created the Quetelet
Index that was a statistical measurement of a person’s weight based on their
height. Latter, the body mass index would use the same concept but rather
created a new unit of measurement based on the kilogram per square meter. It
was with this new BMI that a universally practiced measurement was adopted in
which a person’s acceptable, or normal, body weight could be determined by the
square of the person’s height. The BMI charts of today use this same
principal, but in an easy to use chart rather than requiring a mathematical
calculation for each and every person. The BMI that was developed back in the
1800’s was reintroduced as the body mass index during the late 1960’s when
people started to become noticeably over and under-weight in the highly
prosperous west. Since then, many doctors not only in America, but around the
world have come to use this method of dividing their weight by the square of
their height to come up with the BMI to determine if one was over, under or of
a normalized weight. This is not used so much to determine if
someone is over or under weight, but rather to determine if one was more or
less susceptible to health issues which are related to ones weight. Today, the
BMI is regularly scrutinized due to the fact that many doctors routinely use
the BMI number to diagnose a person’s health related issues, which of course
was never the true intention of the body mass index. The body mass index scale is a proportional
one which can easily break down to a simple proportional value. To state it
more simply, if your height is doubled, so should your weight. This also
creates an issue since persons h\who are horizontally challenged tend to be
more stout leading to a higher BMI stating that they are over weight when this
is most likely not true. On the reverse side, taller persona also tend to fall
within the under weight category due to the fact that taller people tend to be
more narrow. To compensate for these related issues, the
BMI Prime was created which is basically a second BMI that is only relational
to the upper frame of one’s body, therefore fixing the issue with persons of
extremely low and high heights. According to the BMI Prime, which does not
follow the standard BMI ratio, one who has a BMI Prime of less than 0.74 are under
weight while those greater than 1 are over weight. The BMO Prime also goes based on an upper
limit to allow for persons of different ethnicity to be more accurately
evaluated as to whether or not they are over or under weight for their height.