The number of weightlifters who compute their BMI and then think, "Oh, no, it turns out I'm obese" must be approximately zero.

The number of people who are going to get a caliper test done or a water displacement test, outside of elite athletes, is again approximately zero.

The number of people who are overweight or obese and don't realize and could discover it using just two pieces of easily available information is more than I could count in my lifetime, working 24/7.

You can call it pseudoscience but that doesn't do anything for the fact that far too many Americans are fat by more scientific scales as well.

Then we can use the more scientific scales.

It's easy to criticize BMI as a metric, and it's certainly not perfect, but for research and public health purposes it's good enough.

The real COVID-19 risk isn't from BMI or even obesity in general, but specifically from excess visceral fat.

https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(20)3030...

However measuring visceral fat is slow and expensive since it requires something like a DXA scan. We don't have enough equipment to scan everyone. So we usually rely on BMI as a proxy.

And BTW includes most of the EU as well.

Countries like the US includes the EU too, at a lower level but still over 50% are supposedly overweight. [1]

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...

These stats were made before the EU's most obese country left the union ;)

If you look at obesity level per country, the most populous country in the EU is on rank 79 of 191, not far from the middle of the table, while the US is on rank 12, with mostly micro nations above it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity...

Obesity is increasing in most EU countries. Give them a few years and they'll eventually catch up to the US and UK.

It works well enough for the general population. People don’t like being told they’re overweight though, so there’s a lot of surface level commentary about it.