According to recent studies, your waist-to-hip ratio may be a more accurate measure of your health than your BMI.
The use of BMI as a screening tool for obesity and overweight is common but contentious.
There were differing views among the experts consulted by Healthline regarding the importance of the waist-to-hip ratio.
Your body mass index (BMI) is probably something you already know if you’ve had a checkup in the last year. However, how does your waist to hip ratio look?
According to recent studies, waist-to-hip ratio may be a quicker, more precise measure of weight and overall health than BMI.
Researchers examined over 400,000 people in a study that was published on September 20 in the medical journal JAMA Network Open Trusted Source to determine if waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) or BMI was a better predictor of serious unfavorable health outcomes, such as:
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Cancer
Cardiovascular disease
Death
They came at the following conclusion: “WHR had the strongest and most consistent association with mortality, irrespective of BMI.”
Furthermore, the researchers claim that their findings have ramifications for medical practices as well, contending that using WHR as a major indicator of health may yield superior results to using BMI alone.
“We are curious to know what the risk factors are for cardio-metabolic disorders and the most accurate way to measure them. As the lead author of the study and a professor of medicine at McMaster University, Dr. Guillaume Paré told Healthline that the project’s goal was to establish the most accurate method for measuring adiposity.
“These results suggest that WHR should be used clinically and support the growing body of literature that has demonstrated WHR to be superior to BMI,” he said.
waist-to-hip ratio versus BMI
The UK Biobank, a medical research database with anonymized health and lifestyle data about its participants, was used for the study by Paré. With an average age of about 60, the participants included 387,672 people from the United Kingdom.
Mendelian randomization was employed by researchers.Trusted Source, which uses genetics to assist explain inherited propensity for conditions including cancer and cardiovascular disease.
They discovered that BMI followed a “J-shaped association,” whereas WHR exhibited a direct linear association, when comparing BMI and WHR to all-cause death. That basically means that, regardless of BMI, every rise in WHR results in worse health consequences.
In contrast, BMI results were poorer at lower ranges, improved in the middle (healthy BMI range), and then started to deteriorate once more when it reached overweight and obese levels.
WHR, according to Paré and his team, delivers a straightforward, easy-to-read measurement. A WHR score should be as low as feasible, unlike BMI, which has a healthy range. Common recommendations call for a WHR of 0.95 for men and 0.80 for women.
According to our analysis, the lower the better. According to Dr. Paré, “We didn’t find a limit where no additional advantage was demonstrated.
Compared to WHR, what do professionals say about BMI?
Other specialists who Healthline contacted refuted the claim that WHR is more accurate than BMI.
The study’s robust sample size and use of Mendelian Randomization to account for genetic influences were praised, although Dr. Maya Mathur, PhD, an assistant professor of the Quantitative Sciences Unit at Stanford School of Medicine, disagreed with the study’s conclusions in the end.
She told Healthline, “I do think some of the conclusions of this new study are potentially deceptive.
For women (but not for males), BMI was just as accurate as WHR at predicting all-cause death. This suggests that, for women specifically, BMI would almost probably be a better predictor than WHR if the BMI connection had been properly evaluated by taking into account its nonlinear effects, the expert stated.
Why is BMI a contentious issue?
Since 1975, the prevalence of obesity has almost tripled worldwideTrusted Source. At this point, obesity is thought to affect one-third of people worldwide. The BMI, one of the simplest and most popular health measures used by doctors today, is the basis for these figures.
a rather straightforward equationBMI is calculated by dividing your weight by the square of your height, according to a reliable source.
There are numerous detrimental health effects that are well-established to be associated with obesity and overweight according to BMI, including:
Heart condition
Cancer
Death
However, despite its extensive use, BMI is still debatable.
Those who object to using BMI as the main indicator of health bring out several crucial issues:
Body type variations are not taken into consideration by BMI. Regardless of your degree of fitness, if you are muscular but weigh more than you should, you are still deemed to be overweight or obese.
For BMI, there are recognized racial variances. Asians in particular are more susceptible than Caucasians to changes in BMI.
The distribution of body fat is not taken into account by BMI. People with stored fat in their hips, buttocks, and thighs are less likely to develop chronic diseases than those with stored fat around their midsectic
The bottom line
New research concludes that waist-to-hip ratio or only waist circumference are simple and accurate health measurement that could potentially displace the use of BMI in the doctors’ office.
Waist-to-hip ratio showed a clear linear association with adverse health outcomes like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and death.
Other experts content that BMI is still an important, simple, and accurate measurement compared to waist-to-hip ratio.
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