New research points to a better way to measure obesity than body mass index. Body mass index was first developed in 1832 and has been the standard way to estimate a person’s body fat since the 1980s. The calculation, however, has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. One major critique of BMI is that it doesn’t look at how much of a person’s weight is fat, and where fat is distributed around the body.
When they graphed their data, the BRI points created a bell curve, with higher risk of death — an indicator of poor health — on either end. When charted in the same way, BMI also shows these two extremes, but creates a more flat, not rounded, middle part. That flat part masks variation, which is a big part of the problem. “Variation is part of life,” said Diana Thomas, a mathematics professor at the U.S.