This. I am constantly being tagged as overweight and high risk because of my BMI (5'10" and 175-180lbs but I am very active and the weight is from muscle rather than fat).
I haven't seen one yet, but I highly recommend knowing your cholesterol numbers since those will give a much more accurate result--both BMI and ABSI are very coarse-grained measures of what's likely to be happening inside your arteries.
So now I'm curious; I'd always thought obesity was itself a risk factor, but your calculator does not consider it.
Is the "problem" with obesity only its impact on blood pressure and cholesterol? Or does obesity also increase risk in other ways in addition to worsening those factors?
BMI is archaic and a "one shoe fits all" metric. That doesn't mean that BMI is wrong - just that you should do more detailed diagnoses with your doctor to determine your health.
If BMI is saying you're obese, then get a comprehensive metabolic panel and lipid panel with your PCP, and go from there.
BMI is itself fine for my line of questioning, because I'm curious as to whether excess quantities of fat impact cardiovascular risk in the general case. Determining things like this is exactly the use case of BMI, since across large sample sizes it is a reasonable proxy for what we are really interested in (i.e. how much excess fat the participants have).
Mainly: I'm curious mostly about whether excess body fat on its own impacts cardiovascular health, or whether it does so only indirectly by increasing the risk factors this calculator uses.
Obesity seems to impact long-term cardiovascular health only through the other numbers--i.e., raising your blood pressure and lipids. In the Framingham 30-year risk study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19506114), they tried adding BMI to the risk model, but it didn't add any predictive value. But they used it to create a very approximate risk model for people who don't know their biomarkers.
Also note that you can appear perfectly thin, but have high blood pressure and cholesterol, and thus be at risk! So know your numbers. A lot of health is only revealed by what's going on within your body.
The back-and-forth of this discussion about BMI is entirely predictable, but doesn't it sort of miss the point? Isn't it possible -- and I mean this sincerely, even though it's wildly simplistic -- to just look at a human and determine if they're carrying around excess fat?
A lot of times when I hear people saying that BMI doesn't account for how much they exercise, I'm looking at the person saying it and they appear unfit. On the other hand, do we need BMI to tell us that a fit person is fit? What am I missing here?
Doesn't matter, you still fit into many of the same statistical categories as other people listed as overweight by BMI. It is unlikely your muscle mass is solely responsible for you being listed as overweight
