Because obesity is a complex problem, we must be cautious when we accept easy answers for why children are gaining weight rapidly. Suppose we believe obesity is simply due to eating too much and not ...

Is BMI Accurate? What Is It and Is It Useful? When you go in for a wellness exam, oftentimes the first things the medical assistant does is take your height and weight. With this data, the computer ...

I arrived at my doctor’s appointment on the Monday morning after an indulgent Thanksgiving weekend and did exactly what you’d expect. I went to the restroom to urinate. I took off my shoes and my ...

People who seek medical treatment for obesity or an eating disorder do so with the hope their health plan will pay for part of it. But whether it’s covered often comes down to a measure invented ...

When it comes to measuring weight, BMI is the acronym everyone loves to hate. Health professionals have long used body mass index as a quick screening tool to fast-track certain patients into a “code ...

Staying a healthy weight can be a challenge, and knowing what weight is healthy for you can be, too. Most people rely on the body mass index, or BMI, which is a measure of our weight in relation to ...

Roughly 200 years ago, a Belgian mathematician and statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, seeking to characterize “normal man,” observed that adults’ body weight in kilograms is roughly proportional to ...

Belgian mathematician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet invented what would become the Body Mass Index (BMI) in the early 19th century. The Quetelet Index he created—which works on the assumption that ...