Weight Bias: Fighting for Change from the Inside Out
Why Fat Isn’t Always Unhealthy
Partly to blame for anti-fat discrimination the very standards used to define. When people are above a “normal” size, Osborn says.
The first “ideal weight” tables were developed during the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as a way to predict how long life insurance policyholders might live
n 1985, the National Institutes of Health began using body mass index as a way to measure body fat. BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in meters. According to the CDC, those measurements are:
- Underweight: less than 18.5
- Healthy: 18.5 to 24.9
- Overweight: 25 to 29.9
- Class I Obesity: 30 to 34.9
- Class II Obesity: 35 to 39.9
- Class III Obesity: 40 and above
Anyone who falls into the overweight or obesity categories is presumed to have body fat that presents a risk to their health.
But critics of the BMI, such as Osborn, say that’s too much of an assumption. She points to a February 2016 study in the International Journal of Obesity that concluded if people are deemed as healthy or unhealthy based on BMI alone, roughly 75 million adults in the U.S. are being misclassified.
That’s because 48 percent of the people แทงบอล UFABET ราคาดีที่สุด ไม่มีขั้นต่ำ with overweight. Who were studied were actually healthy by measures like blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar. So were 29 percent of people with class I obesity and 16 percent of those with class II or III obesity. Meanwhile, 31 percent of people deemed to be at a healthy weight by BMI standards were categorized as unhealthy by other tests.