The recently released study on obesity in the Journal of the American Medical Association has raised many concerns–the least and possibly most telling of which is how the experiment was done. The Body Mass Index used by the study is one of the least accurate measures of obesity. An athlete or even a person in good-to-average physical shape can come up as obese according to the BMI and only have 8 to 12 percent body fat (average amounts for 18- to 24-year-olds are 13 to 16 percent for males and 20 to 25 percent for females). One thing many people forget is that muscle mass is more dense, and hence weighs more, than fat. So until more specific research is done measuring the body fat of a large sample of average Americans, we should be cautious about the alarmist message that we are all becoming fat.
