‘Obese’ Not Necessarily Unhealthy, UCLA Researchers Claim

There has been a new study conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles, which found that over 50 million Americans who had been labelled as overweight or obese according to the BMI (body mass index) scale actually aren’t unhealthy.

To find out whether BMI correlated with actual markers of health, a team of UCLA researchers analyzed data from 40,420 individuals who participated in the 2005-2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. A new study has suggested that BMI calculations are crude, and not accurate health assessment, and people who have been labeled obese or overweight could be healthy.

The study results may signify that overweight and obese individuals by virtue of BMI are unlikely to spend higher health costs thus, it may be unfair to charge them with more expensive premiums.

BMI has always been criticized in the health community as an effective measurement of how healthy someone is, but this study puts some more solid evidence behind that criticism, and could result in changes down the road to the Affordable Care Act if it begins to gain traction.

That would be a pretty big deal, especially since the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently proposed rules that would allow employers to penalize employees for up to 30 percent of their health insurance costs if they don’t meet 24 health criteria – which include meeting a specific BMI.

“The public is used to hearing ‘obesity, ‘ and they mistakenly see it as a death sentence”, Tomiyama said.

The conclusions of the study’s authors were that people do not need a normal height and weight ratio in order to be healthy.

“This should be the final nail in the coffin for BMI”, Jeffrey Hunger, co-author of the paper and a doctoral candidate at UC Santa Barbara, said in a statement. My mother took me to my doctor, and she told me that based on my BMI, I should lose 10-15 pounds, despite being in “generally good health”.

Tomiyama, who directs UCLA’s Dieting, Stress and Health laboratory, also called DiSH, found in previous research that there was no clear connection between weight loss and health improvements related to hypertension, diabetes, and cholesterol and blood glucose levels.

Hunger says several health indicators were evaluated for the study.

Tomiyama said that many healthy people are punished on the basis of a faulty health measure and many unhealthy people having average weight will not be charged more for their health insurance. A normal BMI is considered to be between 18.5 and 24.9 according to the CDC. The study was reported in the International Journal of Obesity.