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Is 150 lb overweight?

app.com - Are you overweight? Probably, according to the BMI

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Jerry Carino

@njhoopshaven

Are you overweight? According to the standards of body mass index, the answer likely is yes. The bottom line: BMI results can be startling. For a 5-foot-6 male, a weight over 150 pounds is considered overweight and higher than 185 pounds is obese. For a 6-footer, 185 pounds is overweight and 225 is obese. For a 5-foot-4 female, a weight over 145 pounds is overweight and 175 or more is obese.In the medical community, BMI is the most widely accepted method of calculating whether someone's weight is healthy or risky. It's a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in meters. For the non-mathematicians among us, it's easier to use a BMI calculator on the web, like the Mayo Clinic's at www.MayoClinic.org. "I think BMI is a useful screening tool because it measures the relation of weight to height," said Dr. Diane Rigassio Radler, a professor in Rutgers University's Department for Nutritional Sciences and director of the Institute for Nutrition Interventions. "We can use it for a quick measurement of how much somebody weighs in relation to their stature. It doesn't differentiate body composition, so it will only tell you that the weight is either normal or high or low for the person's stature." That one-size-fits-all approach has provoked a hailstorm of push-back from critics who consider it to be too crude a tool for such an important assessment. "BMI works reasonably well at what it was first designed for: looking at broad trends in the health of large groups – to see if there's an obesity epidemic," David Belk, a California-based MD in internal medicine, wrote for the Huffington Post last year. "It was never designed to assess the 'healthy weight' of an individual, so it really only sort-of works at that." For example, Belk pointed out that a 6-foot-8 athlete would be "overweight" at 230 pounds and "normal" at 170 pounds.

"That can't be right," he wrote.

Muscle mass is not taken into account at all.

"It doesn't differentiate muscle from fat mass, so you may have certain populations such as wrestlers or professional athletes who may have a high BMI as calculated, but they're not a health risk because they have more muscle mass," Rutgers' Radler said.

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BMI also does not account for body shape, which is considered to be a crucial risk factor. Studies show those who sport an "apple shape" – round in the middle, thinner in the upper and lower body – are at higher risk for health problems. It's less risky to be "pear-shaped," with a bulge below the waist. "I don't know how much people are versed in BMI in terms of what their number should be or what the numbers mean," Radler said. "More important is the waist circumference – abdominal obesity means fat around your organs, which can cause an inflammatory state and cause diseases."

In that regard, a better calculation might be waist-to-hip ratio.

"If the ratio is greater than one, it's more of a risk," Radler explained. If you're measuring waist circumference, Radler cautioned to take it in the right spot.

RELATED: What a healthy body? Know what it is made of

"Some men say they have a circumference of 32 because that's the pants size they wear," she said. "That doesn't account for the belly, which is above the pants line." Another issue is that certain ethnic populations, most notably Asians but others as well, tend to store fat differently and more dangerously than Caucasians -- possibly necessitating a different BMI scale. Again, one size does not fit all. "There is no consensus on exactly what we should be doing for ethnic populations," Radler said. "There are some opinions in terms of the Asian population, that they may need lower cutoff values for BMI." In other words, obesity is very much in the eye of the calculator.

Staff writer Jerry Carino: jcarino@gannettnj.com.

app.com - Are you overweight? Probably, according to the BMI

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