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Better than BMI
What's better than BMI (Body Mass Index), the popular governmental indicator of obesity? According to a 2010 study in the Journal of Endocrinology & Metabolism, waist-to-height ratio beats out BMI, waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio for predicting your risk of heart attack, stroke, or death from heart disease. To calculate your waist-to-height ratio, first measure your waist with a good old fashioned tape measure, or better yet a fabric one, by wrapping it around your body at the midpoint between your lowest rib and and your hip bone (the biggest spot, we all know where that's at). Divide that number by your height to get the final number, which should be around 0.5. "Determining your waist-to-hip ratio can help indicate your level of visceral fat, the dangerous belly fat linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer," says George Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of Harvard medical school's division of nutrition. For waist-to-hip, you need to measure your hip circumference by wrapping the measuring tape around the widest part of your hips. Then divide your waist number by your hip number - 0.9 or lower is a good place to be. You can enter your measurements into the Vitals tracker and it will calculate these things for you.
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