Feeling fine, body mass index kinder suprise.

Using BMI to put labels on kids, seems mean.

I agree. Who thought this was a good idea?

Comments and Key points

This article recommends optimum Body Mass Index threshold values to define obesity:

BMI threshold	Boys	Girls
Age 10-11	19.0	19.6
Age 12-13	19.4	21.2
Age 14-15	24.0	21.9

It’s a good article from a perfectly conducted study. The population sample came from Lisbon, Portugal, which is the only factor that makes the results seem potentially not applicable to other nationalities. The keywords should have been obesity children child.

Lisbon's optimum adolescent obesity thresholds

But as these charts show, their recommendations, (labeled as blue dots "Lisbon Obesity") are quite a bit lower than the CDC‘s definition of obesity at the 95^th percentile line of BMI for age.

Charts are confusing.

Lets just say, defining obesity in children is somewhere between 85th and 95th percentile of body mass index.

But, compared to the CDC’s definition of overweight at the 85^th percentile line of BMI for age, the Lisbon thresholds seem more appropriate.

Compared to CDC Overweight BMI, regarding child obesity

A closer reading of this article, shows they actually were thinking about the 85^th percentile, but they seem to be unwilling to use the word "overweight". I guess that’s the only confusing thing about this study. Obviously, their results should be interpreted as an "overweight" threshold for adolescents, which corresponds to >=25% body fat for boys and >= 30% body fat for girls.

Let me explain also, that this post was actually from a webpage that I made over 10 years ago, way back when I was first researching BMI. As you can see, the article date is quite old, from 1999. I’ve moved it into a wordpress post.

Why wordpress? Is it more fun?

Wordpress is fun. On the other hand, this link at a CDC website about BMI in children, is also on this topic.

Here’s a Harvard Obesity children child link.

P.S. If someone can explain why a very popular google search phrase seems to be obesity children child, which isn’t good grammar, please feel free to email me and explain.