Body mass index was invented in the nineteenth century by a Belgian astronomer, not a medical doctor, and was strictly designed to track population statistics rather than diagnose the individual health of a human being.

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Body mass index was invented in the nineteenth century by a Belgian astronomer, not a medical doctor, and was strictly designed to track population statistics rather than diagnose the individual health of a human being. The deeply flawed mathematical formula only accounts for total mass versus height, completely failing to distinguish between heavy, dense muscle tissue and actual body fat, routinely classifying elite professional athletes as dangerously obese. Despite being widely recognized as a medically terrible metric by modern science, insurance companies and healthcare systems rigidly cling to it because doing simple math is much easier than actually examining a patient. You could possess the cardiovascular health of an Olympic sprinter, but an outdated calculation created by a guy studying the stars two hundred years ago will still boldly declare that you need to lose weight