edward teach wrote:
BMI was created by experts in the fields of medicine and health.
If wikipedia is to be believed, the BMI formula was created in the 19th century by a Belgian guy with no special medical expertise:
"The body mass index (BMI), or Quetelet index, is a measure of relative weight based on an individual's mass and height. Devised between 1830 and 1850 by the Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet during the course of developing "social physics",[2] it is defined as the individual's body mass divided by the square of their height – with the value universally being given in units of kg/m2."
It also seems that when the term BMI was coined in the early 1970s, the idea was to use the measure to compare populations, which makes a lot of sense. Again from wikipedia [emphasis added]:
"The term "body mass index" (BMI) for the ratio and its popularity date to a paper published in the July edition of 1972 in the Journal of Chronic Diseases by Ancel Keys, which found the BMI to be the best proxy for body fat percentage among ratios of weight and height.[3][4] The interest in an index that measures body fat came with increasing obesity in prosperous Western societies. BMI was explicitly cited by Keys as appropriate for population studies, and inappropriate for individual diagnosis. Nevertheless, due to its simplicity, it came to be widely used for individual diagnosis.