Body Mass Index: A History

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图片uetelet.jpg



This s*****p was issued by Belgium in 1974 to commemorate the centennial of Quetelet's death.

It seems we're all rather obsessed by BMI, but where did the idea come from for the body mass index? The history of it goes back further than you might think. Although the 1980's saw the equation becoming a popular measure of fitness (or conversely, obesity), it was developed in the mid 1800's by a Belgian mathematician named Adolphe Quetelet.

Statistics was in its infancy at the time, and Quetelet worked with life insurance companies to try to determine the factors related to birth and death. He became very interested in the field of social statistics and wrote a book that cataloged his research on height and weight for men at different ages. Height and weight charts are commonplace now, but in 1833 this was revolutionary. What we call BMI today is also known as Quetelet's formula.
When and why did body mass index become the American standard for determining thresholds of healthy weight?

The definition of overweight has changed over the years and varies from country to country as well.

In the United States before 1980, normal weight was generally determined by sex-specific height/weight tables. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's table was the standard, which used minimum and maximum weights associated with the lowest mortality among men and women between 25 and 59 years old. Interestingly, although the MLIC "ideal weight" tables have been largely discarded by medical professionals, the weight to height figures for women of medium frame correspond fairly well to current BMI standards. The MLIC table's ideal weights range from about 20 to just over 25 body mass index. History does repeat itself!

In 1985, the United States National Institute of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Conference on the Health Implications of Obesity (that's a mouthful!) defined obesity as a BMI greater than 27.8 for men and greater than 27.3 for women. These figures were used from 1985 to 1998 to define overweight in NIH publications.

In 1997, The World Health Organization (WHO) began using the index as a standard to determine not only overweight, but also added cutoffs for categories of underweight, preobese, and three classes of obese.

Although BMI is sometimes criticized for being too simplistic, it is a quick and easy way to make generalizations about an individual's or group's level of adiposity, or in layman's terms, fatness. One doesn't need specialized knowledge or equipment to determine it.




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