On Tue, 15 May 2012, Brian Wood wrote: > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9260091/Forget-BMI-just-measure-your-waist-and-height-say-scientists.html Thanks, Brian! I did a little searching around for info about waist-to-height ratio (WHR) and how it compares with body mass index (BMI) as a predictor of various disease outcomes and mortality for different age groups, etc. It looks WHR does not work better for children. But it may be better for predicting cardiovascular disease in adults. The correlation of WHR with BMI is about .9, though, so they aren't very different. The article at the URL above says that it is tricky to compute BMI, but that isn't true if you use my script! ;-) Really, BMI is easy if you know your height and weight and have some web site or script that can compute it for you. A more important consideration is how easy it is to measure weight versus measuring waist circumference. Weight is very easy to do and we have scales for that. The waist seems a little tricky to me because the circumference will depend on exactly where you put the tape measure and weather you suck in your gut, push it out, etc. Weight is a lot harder to fool. Anyway, it's a good idea to use WHR if you have good data to compare against. That's another advantage of BMI -- it's in all the drivers license records in every state, and every research study has it. So we know a lot more about BMI than we know about WHR. Mike