Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating

by Christy Harrison

None of these flaws stopped the insurance companies from using the Quetelet index, though. In 1899 the president of the Association of Life Insurance Medical Directors of America presented some preliminary data from several insurance companies, stating that “from our mortality records the overweights are clearly less desirable than either the normal or the underweights.”41 These records were based almost exclusively on wealthy white men, but modern-day data from much larger, more representative samples shows that “the overweights” actually have the lowest mortality risk of any group on the BMI chart.42 The BMI is also notoriously imprecise; it can’t tell you anything about a person’s body composition, nor can it accurately predict their health outcomes. Indeed, many researchers over the years have recommended that BMI be discarded as an outdated and ineffective tool for measuring health.43