Why is BIA a better measure for economic analyses?
In the past, economists in particular and social scientists in general have used BMI pretty unquestioningly. Social scientists have not kept pace with the medical research, in which researchers have demonstrated that various measures of fatness differ in their ability to predict health outcomes like heart attack. Our major point is that each measure of fatness and obesity has its unique strengths and weaknesses, and that social scientists should consider other measures of fatness than BMI and other measures of obesity than that defined by BMI. For example, in our forthcoming paper in the Journal of Health Economics we report the correlation between employment and fatness, measured both by BMI and percent body fat (calculated using BIA), in NHANES III data. Our research confirms that there is a correlation between BMI and employment–obese people are less likely to work. However, when total body mass is disaggregated into fat versus lean body mass (which includes muscle, bone, and fluid
