The News For Obesity Gets Even Worse

The gold standard for classifying people as obese was using their BMIs or Body Mass Index.  Unfortunately, it seems that BMIs severely underestimate how fat we really are.   That’s bad.  When women in a recent study had a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scan, which measures body fat, muscle mass and bone density, almost half of women (48 percent) were misclassified as not obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by percent body fat on DEXA.   Amazingly enough, 25 percent of men were misclassified as being obese by BMI, but were in fact not obese by percent body fat.  This study ,and article which talks about it, really point out how things are changing.   It even looks like Leptin levels will be a new marker of health.   All this shows that as we continually learn more, through better testing and technology, that we have to be able to open our minds to new paradigm shifts.  We also should NEVER use these numbers (BMIs, cholesterol, Leptin, body weight, etc.) as quality indicators because they do, in fact, change.  Makes sense?