Body Fat Measurement

Why body fat measurement may be better than a scale
January 06, 2012 By Deborah Kotz


"Earlier this week, I wrote about a new study that pointed to the limits of the bathroom scale in terms of evaluating weight gain -- or weight loss. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that overeating a high-protein diet led to more weight gain than overeating a low-protein diet but that this extra weight gain came from added muscle, not body fat.


That led me to wonder: just how much useful information does my $50 bathroom scale really yield?


Not much, according to some of the leading diet researchers. In absolute numbers, that number on the scale can tell dramatically different stories depending on your level of physical fitness, according to Dr. David Heber, director of the University of California Los Angeles Center for Human Nutrition.


'People can look thin on the outside but be fat on the inside,' he said. That would occur if they have a high percentage of body fat and a low percentage of muscle, something that becomes more of a problem as people age.


There are also muscular folks who have a body mass index, or BMI -- a measure of weight compared with height that doesn’t distinguish between fat and muscle -- that would qualify them as being overweight, even though they have an extremely low body fat percentage.  --------------------- "


Good article.  There's more.  Here is a link if you would like to read all of it.


http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-06/health-wellness/30596587_1_bioelectrical-weight-gain-bmi


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