We Are Not Cattle — Inflammation, BMI, and What Modern Medicine Keeps Missing
The body in front of the doctor is easy to measure. Weight goes on a scale. Height goes on a chart. Divide one by the square of the other and you have a number — a BMI — that gets entered into a database and flagged if it falls outside a range established in the 1830s by a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet who was studying the statistical distribution of soldiers, not the metabolic health of individuals. Quetelet called his formula the Indice de Corpulence. He did not intend it as a clinical tool. He was doing population statistics. …