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deadliftothersup t1_jajwth4 wrote

Reply to comment by No_Suggestion_8234 in Let’s get moving NH by bluesmom913

Sure, I'll start with a basic muticohort mulitcountry study but it is one of the most used health metrics in population health, so I could dog up thousands depending on what you specifically want to know.

Diabetes

Here is a meta-analysis of 143 studies on mortality. Notice that there is a relatively wide range of where folks are not passing early, but in general, the higher the more problematic. Now if we are talking joint health, the point at which BMI is a predictor of pain is likely a lot lower than mortality for most folks.

I'd be happy to talk about the limitations of BMI as well. I've published papers on issues of self-report as well as the the bidirectional nature of some health issues with obesity, but hopefully that's at least a baseline to show that I'm not just making things up.

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No_Suggestion_8234 t1_jajzqeu wrote

Interesting, thank you for your response. This is contrary to what I've heard from my PCP so I was curious

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deadliftothersup t1_jak27i4 wrote

So my hope and assumption is that they were likely saying "for individual use it's not great" which of course is PCP's bread and butter and on that note I would agree (with some caveats).

Unfortunately I'd like not to doxx myself by showing my own published stuff and having my name out there, but I actually got frustrated at one point in grad school by looking for something novel to say about the predictive value of WHR, circumference, and BMI and after a lot of hours on a really big longitudinal study I came away with "meh, use whichever".

Of course, if I wanna be super accurate, I'm doing a dexa scan or something, but geez human research is already expensive and I could rent this multi thousand dollar machine or just have a cheapo scale and wall height measurement and have it be good enough for research purposes.

Lastly, I think it absolutely must be said that regardless of size, moving more can counteract a ton of this stuff to the point where the negative cardiometabolic effects are hugely diminished. A lower bmi person is absolutely not 1:1 healthier.

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