For years, body mass index (BMI) has been the health metric that millions of us have looked to when it comes to determining the state of our health.
But now experts say we should focus on the ‘body roundness index’ (BRI), which gives us a better indicator of the fat we should be most concerned about: the flab around our vital organs.
BMI is a simple calculation that uses your height and weight to tell you if you are too big for your height.
In contrast, BRI is more complex and uses a detailed, multi-stage formula to compare your height to your waist circumference.
But now, MailOnline has created a simple tool that does the heavy lifting for you, providing a BRI result between zero and 20 using your height and waist circumference.
According to studies that have verified the measure, a “healthy” result is between 0.3 and three. However, getting this result suggests that you are in the minority.
According to national averages, the majority of British adults have a BRI of 3.8, putting us in the unhealthy category as a nation.
While BMI has been used for years, it has its flaws. For example, it can’t distinguish between muscle and fat in people’s weight, which means it bizarrely calculates that chiseled wrestler and actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is technically obese.
Instead, some experts say what you should look at is your “body roundness index.”
Even the NHS now advises people using their BMI calculator to also look at their waist shape.
“It is recommended to measure your waist to find out if there is too much fat around the abdomen,” reads the health service advice.
The potential health importance of BRI, which was only coined as a term about a decade ago, has been supported by studies.
Chinese research this year found that those with higher BRIs had up to a 163 percent higher risk of heart disease compared to those with thinner waists.
Professor Brendon Noble, an expert in regenerative medicine and biological sciences at the University of Westminster, said LBBB was a potential indicator of toxic fat building up around vital organs in the abdomen, which research suggests is strongly linked with a series of health problems.
These include heart disease, cancer and premature death.
“Many studies suggest that the more body fat you have, the more likely you are to have it,” he said. The telegraph.
Some experts prefer BRI to BMI because it focuses on the type of fat of most concern: visceral fat.
According to the BMI system, a score of 18.5 to 25 is healthy. A score of 25 to 29 counts as overweight, and more than 30 means that a person is obese, a stage at which the chances of getting sick skyrocket.
The Hollywood heartthrob or the Hulk? Muscular celebrities such as Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Vin Diesel and Arnold Schwarzenegger are considered obese according to the body mass index formula that is widely used by health authorities around the world. Some scientists now argue that it should be replaced. Schwarzenegger’s figures correspond to his “peak” as a bodybuilder
Also called “skinny fat,” as people with an overweight BMI can have excess, packs of visceral fat around our internal organs.
While BRI does not measure visceral fat as accurately as a scan would, it acts as a low-cost indicator that people may need to improve their diet or increase their exercise.
Professor Noble said: “We still have a lot to learn about fat and how it can affect our health… but visceral fat appears to be more dangerous than subcutaneous fat, according to research.”
Experts have previously criticized BMI as a measure of health.
Devised by a Belgian mathematician in the 1830s, doctors have relied on BMI for almost two centuries.
A defect is that it is unable to differentiate between fat distribution and muscle mass.
This means that a fit rugby player and a couch potato of exactly the same height and weight share the same scores, even if the former has a muscular physique and the other carries a spare tire.
Obesity has been shown to increase the risk of serious diseases that can damage the heart, such as high blood pressure, as well as cancer.
Being too fat is estimated to cause one in 20 cases of cancer in Britain, according to Cancer Research UK.
Britain’s obesity crisis is also estimated to cost the nation almost £100 billion a year.
This colossal figure includes health damage to the NHS, as well as secondary economic effects such as loss of income from people taking time off work due to illness and premature death.