Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. For these reasons as well as the influence of environmental, hormonal, and mental factors, “your body size is not a very good ...

BMI is still commonly used to assess obesity even though research has shown it's not necessarily a reliable metric. A new study proposes doctors instead use technology that can measure body fat. Body ...

People who seek medical treatment for obesity or an eating disorder do so with the hope their health plan will pay for part of it. But whether it's covered often comes down to a measure invented ...

When you go in for a wellness exam, oftentimes the first things the medical assistant does is take your height and weight. With this data, the computer spits out your body mass index (BMI) number.

BMI is a quick and widely used tool for estimating body weight relative to height, but it has important limitations. Experts stress that it doesn’t distinguish between fat, muscle, or bone, and can ...

Recently, an international commission proposed a revised definition of obesity that focuses on how excess body fat affects the body, and factors in waist circumference, rather than simply calculating ...

A new study suggests that one of the most widely used health metrics, BMI, may be getting it wrong for a large portion of the population. By comparing BMI classifications with precise body fat ...

Imagine a sales rep comes to your clinic office to pitch a new gadget to gauge your patients' health. They tell you that it's not nearly as good as the measures you already have. It performs even ...

Many experts, over many years, have questioned the value of using body mass index (BMI) to determine a patient’s health status. “A person’s health is influenced by a complex mix of health behaviors, ...

Elizabeth Cooney is a cardiovascular disease reporter at STAT, covering heart, stroke, and metabolic conditions. You can reach Liz on Signal at LizC.22. The body mass index is not going away, a new ...

At your last physical, your doctor may have recorded your body mass index (BMI). That statistic has long been thought of as an indicator of how healthy someone is. While it's still helpful, the truth ...