5/10/2023 0 Comments Google body mass index calculatorThis effort prevailed among larger attempts to relate obesity and body build to incident disease, death, or survival, which were among the core pursuits of Ancel Keys’ career. We happen to know that Keys himself did all these analyses and wrote this article, while his co-authors, all long-term colleagues, provided the cohorts and made the field measurements. We then refer to the example of epidemiological design in which Keys tested the several indices across populations of men varying widely in body size and build. The latter validation was based on correlation of an index with direct measures of body fat, either by the practical method of skin-fold thickness or the ‘platinum meter’ of laboratory-determined body fat. In the text, he compared historic indices of relative weight for their independence of weight from height and for their representation of body fatness. To begin, we particularly recommend Keys’ short introduction to the article for the characteristic clarity and parsimony of his writing and for his lucid thinking about the measurement and meaning of body mass. It was in the 1972 article, reproduced here partly because of its voluminous citations, that Ancel Keys gave Quetelet’s calculation its modern name, body mass index (BMI), along with evidence to support its current wide usage. Along this historical vein, our colleague, Warren Winkelstein, in a note just before his death, reminded us that the mid-19th century Belgian polymath, Adolphe Quetelet, under the premise that ‘the transverse growth of man is less than the vertical’, derived the function most used today to characterize relative body weight, that is, the ratio of weight (kg) over height (m) squared. 1 This preoccupation was reflected in some 50 of Keys’ 500-odd publications. We reflect upon Ancel Keys’ classic article, reprinted here, which dealt with a leitmotif of his long career: body mass, its composition, measurement, function and meaning for health, disease and survival.
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