Dear Lawmakers, Enough with the B.M.I.

Dear Lawmakers: 

I am a concerned parent, writing in response to a letter I just received from my daughter's elementary school.  Apparently, my 5-year old daughter's BMI indicates she is "obese."

What I already knew to be true before I received this letter is that my daughter is anything but "obese."  

Curious and rather upset after receiving this letter, I began doing some research.  I was not surprised to find out that BMI is not a reliable indicator of body fat.  The problem is not just that "the indicator does have limitations," as the letter from the schools says, but that it is almost entirely unreliable.  It employs faulty logic to declare an individual obese.  According to NPR's Keith Devlin, BMI, which was created 200 years ago to measure how obese the overall population was, was never intended to measure how obese an individual is.  Moreover, while an obese person may have a higher BMI, a higher BMI is not an indication of obesity.  This is, according to Devlin, not unlike the following logic:  If a get a bike for Christmas, we can be sure my present has wheels.  But just because my gift has wheels does not necessarily mean it is a bicycle (Devlin).  We are mandated by the State to assess our children's individual body fat content with a tool that was never meant to do any such thing and which promises to do so inaccurately.  In fact, according to Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, BMI "actually misses more than half the people with excess body fat" (qtd. in Brody).  Conversely, the indicator often classifies perfectly healthy people as overweight or obese (Brody).  

Why, then, would Pennsylvania demand that our public school system employ this unreliable tool to curb a growing obesity problem?  According to Brody, the answer to this question is simple.  BMI is faster and cheaper than other, more reliable methods.  

To address the problem of unidentified obesity problems, which will likely haunt children for the rest of their lives, we have now employed a strategy than can only serve to mislead parents and children and distract efforts that can be focused in the most effective directions only with accurate tools of measurement.  In other words, to help obese children, you have to actually be able to identify obesity accurately.  And you just can't do that with the BMI.  Worse, hurling out arbitrary declarations of "overweight" or "obese" can actually harm a healthy child's self-esteem and detract from their understanding of health and wellness.  For instance, my daughter exercises daily, eats organic fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats, avoids excess sugars and chemicals in her diet, employs regular deep breathing techniques throughout her day, and even does occasional yoga and Zumba.  This, she understands at the early age of 5, is what constitutes health, not an arbitrary number that measures neither her body fat accurately nor her level of health and wellbeing.  In fact, the BMI ignores all that makes my daughter healthy in favor of a fast and cheap result of an equation, the creator of which warned should not be used for measuring individual fat content.  

I write this email to urge you all against the continued use of faulty measurements in our state's crusade against obesity.  Multiple alternatives exist that will more accurately focus our efforts so that we can effectively combat the growing obesity problem.  For instance, according to Brody, measuring the waist and hips with a tape measure can identify abdominal obesity.  Also a skin-fold caliper can be used to accurately identify how much fat an individual has (Brody).  These are just a couple more trustworthy alternatives. 

Let us not rely on faulty measurements but instead create a firm foundation of reliable data with which we can campaign for better health.  Lifelong health begins with an early understanding of what good health actually is and how it can be manifested.  Rather than distracting from real health risks, potentially harming children's self-esteem, creating the impetus for unhealthy body images and potentially even eating disorders, not to mention wasting our state's valuable time and resources, let us offer our children tools for lifelong health.  Let us arm our children with an awareness of what it means to take care of their bodies lest we leave them floundering with the notion that the shape of their bodies will determine their fates.