BMI, according to Keys, is appropriate for population studies but not for individual evaluation. The desire for a body fat index arose in response to rising obesity rates in developed Western societies.
In this work, Keys stated that the BMI was “…at least as excellent as any other relative weight index as a predictor of relative obesity, if not totally satisfactory.”
Ancel Keys and colleagues invented the term “body mass index” (BMI) to describe the ratio of human body weight to squared height in a paper published in the Journal of Chronic Diseases in July 1972. The BMI can be calculated using a table or chart that shows BMI as a function of mass and height, with contour lines or colors for different BMI categories and other units of measurement (converted to metric units for the calculation).įollowing are the weight categories used to calculate BMI: BMI (kg/m) 2īetween 18, Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, constructed what he dubbed “social physics” and devised the BMI’s foundation. The BMI is calculated by dividing the body mass by the square of the body height, and it is always expressed in kilograms per square meter (kg/m2), with mass in kilograms and height in meters. The body mass index (BMI) is a number calculated from a person’s weight and height.