BMI history

BMI from a historical perspective

Adolphe Quetelet was a Belgian mathematician, statistician, and sociologist. He was a distinguished researcher and also an elected member of several science academies in various countries. Quetelet came to achieve great fame and success as a population statistician. During the 1830s, he was one of the first to start collecting information about the society and its various phenomena to a greater extent. Among other things, he developed a table that came to be called the Quetelet Index. The scale he constructed was based on a statistical notion of how the “average man” typically looks.

BMI history

BMI today

The name Quetelet Index was later changed to the Body Mass Index, which we now shorten BMI. In the 1970s, a report was published in which researchers noted that BMI appeared to be a proper measurement for obesity and health problems related to overweight. It became an international standard for assessing people’s weight.

BMI is relatively easy to calculate and is today the most widely used tool for understanding the relationship between risk for health problems concerning weight.

Here, you can read more about BMI today.