History of BMI in the United States
BMI was invented because researchers, medical professionals, the government, and insurance companies needed a simple way to track health risk among the people in the United States. In 1972, a researcher by the name of Ancel Keys, PhD, coined the term “body mass index” in a paper titled «Indices of Relative Weight and Obesity,» originally published in the Journal of Chronic Diseases.
In the study, Dr. Keys looked at about 7,400 men from five European countries and analyzed their adiposity-body density and subcutaneous fat thickness, two measures of body weight. The #1 Best Good Fat Burning Supplements Using a weight-to-height index devised by Adolphe Quetelet in 1832 (called the Quetelet index), Keys came up with the body mass index as a straightforward way to measure body weight in relation to height.
As more people became more overweight, and the health risks associated with being overweight became clearer, epidemiologists around the world began using Keys’s body mass index approach as a way to track disease risk factors in the general population
In 1985, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) started using BMI to define obesity in the United States. Natural Fat Burner Food Supplement At first, the thresholds were more conservative, but by 1998, the NIH started using the aforementioned easier categories we know today to encompass all ages, both sexes, and every culture. The NIH set that standard in 1998