The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recently released key recommendations from its first Federal Obesity Report, lowering medical thresholds for “overweight” and encouraging millions of Americans to lose weight for good health.
The report’s redefinition of overweight and the subsequent media coverage are oversimplified, misleading and incomplete.
Many articles included height and weight charts to let readers determine whether their “Body Mass Index” (BMI) defines them as “overweight” and thus “at-risk” for serious health problems. Such items oversimplify a complex issue, potentially sending even more Americans into the great abyss of get-thin-quick weight loss schemes that fail 95 percent of the time and that invite negative health effects from “yo-yo” dieting and extreme weight loss.
The BMI calculation alone says nothing about an individual’s health. It is a simple height to weight ratio, unable to measure the complexities of true health risk factors like blood pressure, cholesterol level and genetic predispositions. The report’s oversimplified emphasis on BMIs neglects completely the existing research on the genetic determinants of height and weight and obscures the fact that the determination of “healthy weights” needs to be done on an individual basis.
Moreover, by reporting only the supposed health risks of “high” BMIs, the media has left millions of Americans to assume that the lower their BMI the better. Media coverage has failed to mention the serious health risks, like infertility, bone-density loss, anorexia and electrolyte imbalances often found in people with very low BMIs.
Instead of promoting a new magic number on the scale for Americans to measure their health, the media and government should educate the public about the complexities of correlating weight with health. To continue to do otherwise is irresponsible and, ironically, unhealthy.
