Bah, sorry for the double comment. Also wanted to add:
a waist-to-hip ratio greater than 80% is considered unhealthy
I think that's something which needs to be placed in context, like the BMI. (Which too often isn't.) I just wouldn't want to see that misused the way the BMI has been. (For example, my mother has a friend whose husband is a weightlifter. He's 250lbs of rock-hard muscle, but he can't get life insurance because his BMI is too high. Insurance agents who've never clapped eyes on him are convinced he's "obese.")
How I first ran into the waist-to-hip ratio: I found a site with a "health calculator," intended to give you some sort of assessment of overall health, based on information you entered like height, weight, if you smoke, hours of physical activity, etc. And it turned out my waist-to-hip ratio (at the time) was 0.82. But that's 28 inches divided by 34. And I STILL got a message telling me that I'm "apple" shaped and need to talk to my doctor about losing weight. Um...?
I thought I must have entered something wrong. I did it over three times before I finally concluded (with some bewilderment) that the site WUZ BROKE.
The "calculator" apparently wasn't designed to weigh all the information you gave it as a whole. Like, uh, BMI calculators insurance agents apparently use to avoid needing a health assessment made by a human being.
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P.S.
Date: 2007-07-28 08:38 am (UTC)a waist-to-hip ratio greater than 80% is considered unhealthy
I think that's something which needs to be placed in context, like the BMI. (Which too often isn't.) I just wouldn't want to see that misused the way the BMI has been. (For example, my mother has a friend whose husband is a weightlifter. He's 250lbs of rock-hard muscle, but he can't get life insurance because his BMI is too high. Insurance agents who've never clapped eyes on him are convinced he's "obese.")
How I first ran into the waist-to-hip ratio: I found a site with a "health calculator," intended to give you some sort of assessment of overall health, based on information you entered like height, weight, if you smoke, hours of physical activity, etc. And it turned out my waist-to-hip ratio (at the time) was 0.82. But that's 28 inches divided by 34. And I STILL got a message telling me that I'm "apple" shaped and need to talk to my doctor about losing weight. Um...?
I thought I must have entered something wrong. I did it over three times before I finally concluded (with some bewilderment) that the site WUZ BROKE.
The "calculator" apparently wasn't designed to weigh all the information you gave it as a whole. Like, uh, BMI calculators insurance agents apparently use to avoid needing a health assessment made by a human being.