This grouping of articles is on the theme of measuring body fat percentage with those impedance scales, and showing how they were used for some fairly simple but kindof useful conclusions.
Men with body fat under 25% were over BMI of 25 but are not fat or overweight.
This abstract is not indexed in PubMed but it was reproduced on the Tanita Corporation website1. I also reproduce it here because of it’s interesting data.
It found that, in Japanese men with a BMI above the overweight threshold of 25 kg/m2, that 47% of those men were not actually "overweight" based on their amounts of body fat.
The study itself isn’t particularly scientific however. It didn’t compare the BMI machine to another reference standard. It didn’t acknowledge that Asians probably need different BMI thresholds than caucasians.
But it does provide an illustration of a Tanita body fat monitor scale being used in a scientific research study. There are others, and some are shown below.
The point seems to be: Weight loss is associated with increased mortality rate, but Fat loss is associated with decreased mortality rate. But this only applies to people that are not severely obese.
In severely obese people, weight loss also reduces mortality rate.
This study used Tanita equipment to measure bioelectrical impedance, to measure body fat percentages. The formulas for predicting the amount skeletal muscle seem accurate, before and after a weight loss program.
Regarding skeletal muscle measurement of the legs, the Tanita scale seemed to work well. Can’t think of anything extra to add.
Yet another simple study of 19 overweight subjects, showing that Tanita’s leg-to-leg Bio-electrical impedance methods gave equivalent body fat percentage results to Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA).
