HW7

Misleading Data of BMI

The intention and the creation of the BMI calculation was created with good intention to help people professionals and people to understand if they are healthy or unhealthy. The problem with this calculation is it is an extreme oversimplification of this meaning it is bad data because it is incorrectly measuring healthy and unhealthy and producing misleading results. For example, it does not take into account the difference between muscle and fat meaning you could be morbidly obese but have a healthy fat ratio to muscle meaning you are actually healthy but because it only accounts for weight and height it misleads the results. As well as the calculation ignores your bodies fat distribution meaning that your body distributes fat in areas to help protect you and that some areas need more fat and other areas need less that not only does the percentage of fat you have matter but also where it is located along with muscle. It also does not take into account different body types and other factors like age, gender, and ethnicity. This is important to consider because older adults store fatter and less muscle meaning they are healthy but just older. Same for Women naturally have a higher body fat percentage than Men. For Ethnicity every ethnicity has various and different levels of body fat due to this factor which is not considered within the calculation. This BMI calculation may have had good intention to show a big problem but oversimplifies it in a way that is not helpful but harmful as there are many factors in determining if someone is healthy or a normal weight.  For a better calculation we should consider all of these factors that help us more accurately determine if someone is at a good or bad weight and healthy or not. 

Source: National Adult BMI > Data Download > NCD-RisC

Source: VS Code for Graph