American Medical Association says BMI metric caused 'historical harm' by being used for 'racist exclusion,' vows to protect 'gender-affirming care' for transgenders

In the past week, the American Medical Association claimed that the body mass index metric has caused "historical harm" by being used for "racist exclusion" and has vowed to protect "gender-affirming care" for transgenders.

The American Medical Association, which was founded in 1847, is a lobbying group for more than 270,000 physicians and medical students. The New Yorker noted in 2022, "Since 1998, the A.M.A. has spent $462 million on lobbying, an amount exceeded only by the expenditures of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, and the American Hospital Association."

On June 14, the AMA published a paper titled: "Use of BMI alone is an imperfect clinical measure." The AMA said, "But BMI is an imperfect measure because it does not directly assess body fat."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines BMI as: "Body Mass Index (BMI) is a person’s weight in kilograms (or pounds) divided by the square of height in meters (or feet). A high BMI can indicate high body fatness. BMI screens for weight categories that may lead to health problems, but it does not diagnose the body fatness or health of an individual."

The AMA Council on Science and Public Health report stated:

Numerous comorbidities, lifestyle issues, gender, ethnicities, medically significant familial-determined mortality effectors, duration of time one spends in certain BMI categories and the expected accumulation of fat with aging are likely to significantly affect interpretation of BMI data, particularly in regard to morbidity and mortality rates. Further, the use of BMI is problematic when used to diagnose and treat individuals with eating disorders because it does not capture the full range of abnormal eating disorders.

According to The Hill, "The report led the AMA House of Delegates to adopt a policy recognizing issues with BMI for its historical harm, use for 'racist exclusion,' basis on previous generations of non-Hispanic white individuals and lack of gender and ethnicity considerations."

The left-leaning business news website Quartz claimed that the BMI metric is "inherently racist and sexist" because "when Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet developed the index in the 1830s, he did so using data from European white men."

The usage of BMI was popularized in the 1970s by physiologist and nutritionist Ancel Keys – one of the early champions of the Mediterranean diet.

The AMA didn't stop at declaring BMI racist. The medical organization declared that it will fight for so-called "gender-affirming care" for transgender individuals.

On June 12, the American Medical Association House of Delegates passed the Endocrine Society's resolution to "protect access to evidence-based gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals." The AMA said it is the medical community's responsibility to provide "evidence-based care" because political attacks on gender-affirming care have escalated

"In the resolution, the AMA committed to opposing any criminal and legal penalties against patients seeking gender-affirming care, family members or guardians who support them in seeking medical care, and health care facilities and clinicians who provide gender-affirming care," the AMA proclaimed. "The AMA will work at the federal and state level with legislators and regulators to oppose such policies and collaborate with other organizations to educate the Federation of State Medical Boards about the importance of gender-affirming care."

The AMA claimed that "medical intervention is reserved for older adolescents and adults." The American Medical Association noted, "Major medical organizations also agree on waiting until an individual has turned 18 or reached the age of majority in their country to undergo gender-affirming genital surgery."

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