BMI might not be 100% ideal 100% of the time. Understandable. But as a quick bavk of the envelope guide, it's worth a look.
That aside, BMI is not the problem. The problem is we need it in the first place. Replace BMI and we still too many people on unhealthy diets living unhealthy lifestyles. We can point fingers at the metrics (BMI, calories,etc) but life in The West will remain the same.
For any given individual BMI is useless; it was only ever intended for use in population-level studies, and should only ever be used in that fashion, precisely because it’s simply too back of the envelope.
For example consider two people of exactly the same height with exactly the same current health and precisely the same girth, adipose load, etc, but the one with two legs has an overweight BMI and the one with one leg has an underweight BMI. Now you might think the higher BMI one still has a useful metric, but now let’s assume they’ve both got no extra adipose load but extremely well developed skeletal muscle systems; now it’s the one with the low BMI who has a useful metric, only not because of body mass but because of pushing that much blood through a smaller and more compromised circulatory system.
BMI is, and always has been, effectively useless as anything but a cudgel when used against individual patients.
Look around, most people need an envelope, back, front or otherwise. It's not meant to be a cure and/or a be all and end all. It's simply, if you're this... you might have a problem. See a doctor. But instead of seeing a doctor most people are super-sizing their meal + soda. That's not BMI's fault.
No, that is McDonald’s fault, but knowing their BMI doesn’t actually help them in any way. BMI is, again, useless as a reliable measure of anything below population scales, hence why the article discusses an alternative that isn’t actually utterly useless.
McDonald's doesn't put anything in anyone's mouth.
McDonald's doesn't order a super sized meal.
McDonald's doesn't chew the food.
McDonald's doesn't swallow that food.
McDonald's doesn't look down and say, "My stomach is so big, I can't see my penis."
BMI isn't working because it's being ignored. Again, it not a diagnostic tool, it's simply a raise a flag indicator. But why considered your BMI when you can get free refills on soda.
You’ve admitted it’s not a diagnostic tool. Because of that it’s also not a good or even moderately useful flag indicator, and decades of history bear that out, see the original article. Its only utility has ever been as a rough statistical guide for large populations, meaning it may be of use in developing things like regulations for the food industry, regulations like maybe, just maybe, McDonald’s shouldn’t release and widely and aggressively market a sandwich that in one serving represents at least a third to half of a human’s daily dietary energy needs with only a tiny fraction of their nutritional needs (as they’ve done in Canada and will be rolling out on the USA soon).
Also by the time you’ve had that first soda you’ve already done the damage and engaged the systems that make you — including the sort of misinformed and fundamentally ignorant you that thinks it’s all about heroic self control and personal responsibility — crave the second one. It was only marketing done by a manufacturer who had abandoned morality and their own responsibility for their own actions that got you to taste that swill in the first place.
BTW, no one has been able to supersize anything at McDonald’s in two decades, so you references are at least as dated and out of touch with reality as your understanding of dietary science.
And Wikipedia version of things is pretty damn damning:
> History
> Obesity and BMI
> Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, devised the basis of the BMI between 1830 and 1850 as he developed what he called "social physics".[3] Quetelet himself never intended for the index, then called the Quetelet Index, to be used as a means of medical assessment. Instead, it was a component of his study of l'homme moyen, or the average man. Quetelet thought of the average man as a social ideal, and developed the body mass index as a means of discovering the socially ideal human person.[4] According to Lars Grue and Arvid Heiberg in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Quetelet's idealization of the average man would be elaborated upon by Francis Galton a decade later in the development of Eugenics.[5]
> The modern term "body mass index" (BMI) for the ratio of human body weight to squared height was coined in a paper published in the July 1972 edition of the Journal of Chronic Diseases by Ancel Keys and others. In this paper, Keys argued that what he termed the BMI was "if not fully satisfactory, at least as good as any other relative weight index as an indicator of relative obesity".[6][7][8]
> The interest in an index that measures body fat came with observed increasing obesity in prosperous Western societies. Keys explicitly judged BMI as appropriate for population studies and inappropriate for individual evaluation. Nevertheless, due to its simplicity, it has come to be widely used for preliminary diagnoses.[9] Additional metrics, such as waist circumference, can be more useful.[10]
That aside, BMI is not the problem. The problem is we need it in the first place. Replace BMI and we still too many people on unhealthy diets living unhealthy lifestyles. We can point fingers at the metrics (BMI, calories,etc) but life in The West will remain the same.
Deadly. Premature death deadly.