I believe one of the most humiliating moments in my life was having my body mass index (BMI) calculated while in high school. Ugh. Talk about child abuse. I still cringe when I see BMI turn up in the news. However, it may be worthwhile to undergo the BMI test because it can be an awareness-raising tool. According to Dr. K. M. Venkat Narayan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) it is especially useful as regards diabetes.Dr. Narayan, who works with the division of diabetes translation at the CDC, believes BMI can be used to calculate your risk of developing diabetes. He has devised a statistical model for tracking health probabilities for a given individual's lifetime. In the case of diabetes, Narayan takes the BMI of a person at age eighteen and then uses that to estimate diabetes risk, in the form of percentages. For example, a woman who is overweight at age eighteen has a thirty-five percent chance of developing diabetes later in life. In contrast, a woman whose BMI is normal at age eighteen has only a seventeen percent chance, while a very obese eighteen year old has a seventy-four percent chance.
1. A BMI greater than 27 indicates a risk for developing type 2 diabetes, and other health problems which include cardiovascular disease, and premature death. As the implications of the BMI are not the same for everyone, you should discuss your BMI with your physician if it is too high (or too low) according to the chart.
Posted at 5:45AM on Jun 15th 2006 by lisa