Fuck yeah, i was waiting for this discourse to take off. Here's another article saying BMI is both useless AND racist and why we shouldn't use it to measure health

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bmi-scale-racist-health_l_5f15a8a8c5b6d14c336a43b0

“It is racist, and also sexist, to use mostly white men within your study population and then try to extrapolate that and create norms and expectations for women and people of color,” Strings told HuffPost. “They have not been included in the initial clinical analyses, and therefore their actual health outcomes cannot be determined by these findings.”

In short, the way BMI is being used is unscientific because of its origins and the homogenous population it was created from.

thin bodies of northern and western Europeans were upheld as the ideal, while the often larger bodies of eastern and southern Europeans, as well as Africans, were considered signs of their inferiority. All of this was before we really knew anything about the (still blurry and confounding) relationship between weight and health. The modern BMI and its categories ― underweight, normal, overweight and obese ― have inherited much of that racism.

Many males with anorexia nervosa go undiagnosed because they are technically within the “normal” BMI category, Gaudiani said. The same thing happens to people at higher weights, who often don’t get screened for eating disorders despite things like significant recent weight loss, symptoms of malnutrition or reported eating disorder behaviors.

This actually happened to me, to some degree. I went into the doctor for something else after unintentionally losing around 25 lbs in a year due to not eating because of anxiety. My body felt like shit, I was constantly dizzy and tired. My face was sunken. i could feel my bones and see all my ribs. It literally hurt to sit because my ass and thighs were losing padding and i just felt my bones. Some days, i could eat nothing. On my good days, i was able to eat perhaps half a regular meal and a snack. I felt and looked sick.

The doctors said nothing, because i still barely in the "healthy" BMI range (i got big xaddy milkers which throw the scale off. No matter how emaciated i became, the tit persists), in fact they didn't even ask about my weight loss, it was just assumed to be good/intentional. Conversely, years ago i was a bit heavier and barely dipped over to the "overweight" range for BMI. I went to see the doctor for a refill of birth control and immediately my doctor asked "if i was happy at this weight" and adopted a judgemental tone when she asked it. She also implied i didn't need antidepressants if i "took care of myself better" and pressured me to go off them, which i did, which gave me terrible withdrawals and still didn't fix my depression, anxiety, or PTSD. My next doctor put me back on them after i tested high on the depression scale lol

On the flip side, uncle who was in the military was actually forced to lose weight at some point because his BMI was too high - but he was built out of pure muscle and had a healthily low fat %. He had to stop working out and let muscle atrophy to be able to fit their arbitrary weight range.