Comments about the study using a body fat monitor scale

That is a rather long abstract. Here are some the useful tidbits.

They used the Tanita body fat monitor scale, which uses bioelectric impedance, foot-to-foot method. That’s a scale that you can buy and use at home. I’ve seen other published research studies use it too. They quote "Some authors have demonstrated that the foot-to-foot method adopted in the present study presents good correlations with the methods of hydrostatic weight, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) and the conventional method of BIA".

The study actually took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at a private school having Japanese and Caucasian girls as students. So this study is about girls only.

For 10 and 11-year old girls, the 30% body fat threshold was a good cut-off definition of obesity.

But for 16 and 17-year old girls, the 30% body fat threshold was reasonably satisfactory, but a 28% body fat threshold was a little better. There was no significant difference between Japanese and Caucasian girls.

The authors noted that "Asian individuals tend to have greater trunk/leg proportion, this could lead to a variation in the relationship between the BMI and the percentage of fat". In other words, maybe Japanese have shorter legs than North Americans. "Furthermore, various studies have shown that, for the same Body Mass Index, the percentage of fat in Asians is greater than it is in whites".

 
 

Indeed, as Teal’c would say. This page is too short. Let me explain, and you can make fun of me in your mind. Back in the early days of trying to please search engines, there was a hypothesis that when you wanted your content on fat to show up on searches, you also needed a good supply of other pages on the topic of fat, so I turned to the medical literature and found examples like these. They years went by, and now small pages are a liability. But I’m the kind of person who hates to throw things away, so I’ve just left this page sitting here. I haven’t decided whether to delete it or not.