Overfat and Underfat: New Terms and Definitions Long Overdue and their prevalence.

August 27, 2019 by Joshua
in Blog

Some researchers have responded to flaws in terms like obesity and measures like body mass index. BMI, for example, doesn’t differentiate between weight from fat versus muscle.

They created the term overfat, meaning “excess body fat sufficient to impair health.” Unlike BMI, it doesn’t count very muscular people, who may show high BMIs without being obese. It does count people with excess fat but little enough muscle for their BMI to register as normal.

Their paper, Overfat and Underfat: New Terms and Definitions Long Overdue, defines the terms, first describing problems with the terms it would replace.

Their next paper, The Prevalence of Overfat Adults and Children in the US, describes how many people are overfat.

Do you think it’s higher or lower than BMI rates? That is, are there more muscular people misattributed as obese or more so-called skinny-fat people who register as normal?

The answer: “Our review estimated the number of overfat Americans at 91% for adults and 69% for children.”

Over 10:1 overfat:healty and underfat. That seems a lot. Read the papers, see for yourself.

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4 responses on “Overfat and Underfat: New Terms and Definitions Long Overdue and their prevalence.

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