this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
334 points (95.1% liked)

You Should Know

33205 readers
116 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

"The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index." Article unfortunately doesn't give the freaking formula for chrissakes; it's "364.2 − 365.5 × √(1 − [waist circumference in centimeters / 2π]2 / [0.5 × height in centimeters]2), according to the formula developed by Thomas et al.10"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] deafboy@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It is one of the most widely used health metrics but also one of the most reviled, because it is used to label people overweight, obese or extremely obese.

That's like blaming the ruler for labeling you too short or too tall... Can't we just use the tool for rough assessment, while being aware of its limitations, and be happy about it?

[–] BigPotato@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

Look at it this way, BMI is a cross section of weight and height. I was considered "overweight" for ages because I just had tree trunk thighs from hiking and weightlifting. Like, less than 16% body fat but told I'm 'overweight' every time I got weighed.

The ruler was fucking wrong.

Nowadays, I'm much more of a fat fuck so the ruler is right now but only just so... I'm still under 25% when using hydrostatic!

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

i think you’re taking that quote out of context a bit. a few sentences later, the article says

Even physicians have weighed in on the shortcomings of B.M.I. The American Medical Association warned last year that B.M.I. is an imperfect metric that doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex and gender diversity. It can’t differentiate between individuals who carry a lot of muscle and those with fat in all the wrong places.

“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.

so the point they seem to be making is that, while BMI is controversial partly because people like to shoot the messenger, it’s also just not a reliable measurement in a medical context, even as a heuristic. the article also goes into more detail on its other shortcomings as well. the article also indicates how BMI was never intended to be used in a medical context. so, there are plenty of valid reasons for wanting a new metric.

but i do think the sentence you quoted isn’t really doing the author any favors in terms of trying to communicate the central point of the article.

Seems like a lot of the flaws just have to do with the fact that the real metrics you want to use, which would probably be body fat percentage, are hard to measure accurately at home.

[–] eupraxia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

my main beef is that "too fat" is a wildly varying scale from person to person because everyone stores and processes fat differently. and if you're "too fat" that may not in fact be your most relevant health concern. my experience with health providers that focus on BMI during intake is that if you're "overweight" many other health problems will be seen through that lens even if they're unrelated... in my case, lots of dieting advice, being told to exercise more come to find out decades later I had an undiagnosed nervous/muscular condition. now that it's treated somewhat, my weight stays pretty much in "normal" BMI with the same or lower activity. I'm kinda pissed it took this long to get treatment for an underlying condition because the ruler said "too fat."

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 1 month ago

it’s easy to calculate but extremely rough. Efficacy varies immensely. Look, nobody’s forcing you to do anything, I’m just saying that BMI is way too rough to be seriously examined.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago

Or just make a better ruler?