Attempts to establish “ideal weight” standards, the weight associated with the lowest mortality rates, go way back. In fact, when I first started practicing medicine we used the Metropolitan Life Insurance height for weight tables to assess a healthy body weight.
Although considered to be a useful tool at the time, it was not without its limitations and biases. For one, insurance policies don’t necessarily reflect individual needs, also, data on height and weight were measured with non-standardized protocols and equipment.
As with many health screening tools, perfection is often hard to come by. Today, Metropolitan Life height and weight charts have been replaced by Body Mass Index (BMI), the tool used most often by health care professionals, like myself, to evaluate an individual’s body weight in relationship to health and disease risk. It’s easy to use and provides a fairly good estimate of body fat, but it too has its flaws. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, BMI may actually overestimate body fat if you’re an athlete or body builder, or it can underestimate body fat if you’re older, have lost muscle mass, or have low bone density. BMI also tells you nothing about where you carry your body fat and its dangers. So looking beyond BMI may be helpful, especially when it comes to evaluating abdominal obesity which has been tied to an increase risk of conditions such as heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes.
Research conducted in the UK may be shedding new light on the value of another measure–the waist-to-height ratio (WHtR). First proposed in the mid-1990’s, WHtR appears to be gaining momentum as being a better detector of central obesity and the health risks associated with it.
In a 2012 study published in Obesity Reviews, researchers from Oxford Brooks University found that WHtR was a better measure for detecting hypertension, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, abnormal blood lipids, and general cardiovascular outcomes than three other measures: waist circumference; waist-to-hip ratio; and BMI.
And just recently, the same group of researchers reported study findings at the European Congress on Obesity that indicated WHtR was a better predictor of mortality risk than BMI.
Overall they found mortality risk was associated with BMI but WHtR estimates were higher and appeared to be more accurate. For example, a 30-year-old man with the highest BMI had a years-of-life-lost value of 10.5 years, while the same man with the highest WHtR (a waist measurement that was 80% of their height) had a years-of-lost-life value of almost 17 years! For a woman of the same age her years-of-lost-life values were 5.3 years and 9.5 years respectively.
What can we learn from studies like these? Not only the importance of striving for a healthier weight to reduce the risk of weight-related disease but also the importance of measuring your WHtR and reducing dangerous abdominal fat to ensure a long and healthy life. Your goal? A waist measurement that’s no more than 50% of your height. For someone who stands 6 feet tall, that means a waist of 36 inches or less!
Have a healthy and productive weekend!
MJ
Shaklee, helping America live a natural healthier life since 1956!
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