Research
Adherence
Overreliance on BMI as the sole metric for obesity management hinders clinical implementation and confuses clinicians, leading to suboptimal care; waist circumference is a more useful tool for assessing health risk.
Ask your clinician to measure your waist circumference, not just your BMI. This provides better insight into your cardiovascular risk and helps prioritize obesity management interventions.
GoodRefutesHIGH confidence
BMI adds little useful information for most clinicians in terms of how to prioritize care for obesity based on the risk of obesity-related conditions. There is evidence that waist circumference may be useful in this regard...
Why this rating
Based on systematic reviews and clinical statements.
Source
Implementation of Obesity Science Into Clinical Practice: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association
Deepika Laddu et al. · Circulation · 2024
DOI 10.1161/cir.0000000000001221
clinical_guidelineCited 31×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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