University of California in Santa Barbara and UCLA researchers found many Americans who are labeled overweight or obese based on their body mass index are healthy, leading many in the medical community to question the BMI's validity, according to GEN.
Here are five things to know:
1. Researchers found nearly 34.4 million Americans labeled overweight based on their BMI are actually healthy.
2. Nearly 20 million Americans labeled obese are actually healthy.
3. The findings also revealed more than 30 percent of individuals with BMIs in the "normal" range are actually unhealthy based on other markers.
4. Researchers claim healthy people with higher BMIs would be no more likely to acquire high medical expenses with lower BMIs. Therefore, it is not justified to require those with higher BMIs to pay higher insurance premiums, researchers claim.
5. "In the overweight BMI category, 47 percent are perfectly healthy," said Jeffrey Hunger, a doctoral student in UCSB's department of psychological and brain sciences and coauthor of the paper. "So to be using BMI as a health proxy, particularly for everyone within that category, is simply incorrect. Our study should be the final nail in the coffin for BMI."
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