Overview

• A University of Waterloo-led paper in Body Image, titled “The body mass index: What’s the use?”, argues BMI is an inadequate proxy for individual health.
• The authors say BMI cannot distinguish muscle from fat, ignores fat distribution, and overlooks factors such as age, sex, and race, leading to misclassification.
• They highlight real-world harms, noting BMI steers fitness tools and clinical decisions, affects eligibility for care, and fuels stigma toward racialized, disabled, older, and larger-bodied people.
• The study outlines options that include using BMI only with explicit caveats, shifting to more nuanced body-size and outcome measures, or rejecting the metric entirely, with the authors favoring rejection.
• Fresh Statistics Canada figures showing about two-thirds of Canadians labeled overweight or obese are cited as urgency for policy shifts in how health is defined and measured.