For years, body-mass-index (BMI), has been the health metric millions of us have been fixated on when it comes to determining the state of our health.
But now experts say we should be focusing on ‘body roundness index’ (BRI), which gives us a better indicator of the fat that should worry us most — the flab around our vital organs.
BMI it is a simple calculation that uses your height and your weight to reveal you if you are too big for your height.
In contrast BRI is more complex, using a detailed multi-stage formula to compare your height to their waist circumference.
But now, MailOnline has created a simple tool that does the heavy maths for you, providing a BRI result between zero and 20 using your height and waist circumference.
According to studies that have verified the measure, a ‘healthy’ result is between 0.3 and three. However, getting this result suggests you’re in the minority.
According to national averages, most adult Brits have a BRI of 3.8 which puts us in the unhealthy category as a nation.
While BMI has been used for years, it has its flaws. For example, it cannot distinguish between muscle and fat in people’s weight meaning it bizarrely calculates that chiselled wrestler-come-actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is technically obese.
Instead, some experts say you what you should be looking at is your ‘body roundness index’
Even the NHS now advises people using its BMI calculator to also look at the shape of their waist.
‘It is advised that you measure your waist to find out if you’re carrying too much fat around your tummy,’ the health service advice reads.
The potential importance of BRI having a healthy, which was only coined as a term about a decade ago, has been backed up by studies.
Chinese research this year found those with higher BRIs had up to 163 per cent increased risk of heart disease compared to those with slimmer waists.
Professor Brendon Noble, an expert in regenerative medicine and life sciences at Westminster University, said BRI was a potential indicator of toxic fat clumping around vital organs in the abdomen, which research shows is strongly linked to a host of health problems.
These include, heart disease, cancer and early death.
‘Lots of studies suggest that the more body fat you have, the more prone to these you are, he told The Telegraph.
Some experts prefer BRI to BMI because it focuses on the most worrying type of fat — visceral fat.
Under the BMI system, a score of 18.5 to 25 is healthy. A score of 25 to 29 counts as overweight, and 30-plus means a person is obese, the stage at which chances of illness rocket
Hollywood hunk or hulk? Muscular celebrities like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Vin Diesel and Arnold Schwarzenegger are deemed obese under the Body Mass Index formula which is widely used by health authorities around the world. Some scientists are now arguing it should be replaced. Figures for Mr Schwarzenegger are from his ‘peak’ as a bodybuilder
Also called ‘skinny fat’, as people can have an excess with an overweight BMI, visceral fat packs around our internal organs.
While BRI doesn’t measure visceral fat as accurately as a scan would, it acts a low cost indicator that people may need to improve their diet or up their exercise.
Professor Noble said: ‘We’ve still got plenty to learn about fat and how it can impact our health…but visceral does appear to be more dangerous than subcutaneous fat, based on the research.’
Experts have previously criticised BMI as a measure of health.
Devised by a Belgian mathematician in the 1830s, doctors have relied on BMI for almost two centuries.
One flaw is that it is incapable of differentiating between fat distribution and muscle mass.
This means a fit rugby player and couch potato of the exact same height and weight share the same scores — even if the former has a ripped physique and the other carries a spare tyre.
Obesity has been well established as increasing the risk of serious health conditions that can damage the heart, such as high blood pressure, as well as cancers.
Being too fat has been estimated to cause one in 20 cancer cases in Britain, according to the Cancer Research UK.
Britain’s obesity crisis is also estimated to cost the nation nearly £100billion per year.
This colossal figure includes the health harms on the NHS as well as secondary economic effects like lost earnings from people taking time off work due to illness and early deaths.
