Sure, but for some reason everyone assumes BMI overstates obesity.
The opposite is more likely true. Strength and muscle mass are declining as waist size increases.
One study looked at this. BMI found ~30% of the participants were obese. But a body fat analysis showed 60% were obese!
Staggering difference, but in wrong direction
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
But all of this nonsense nitpicking about bone density vs muscle vs fat is irrelevant when using it to look at large population cohorts over time. Looking at weight vs height is a good, easily calculable metric without needing to put everyone in a float tank.
The US BMI has skyrocketed over the past 50 years solely because we've gotten a ton fatter. There have also been plenty of corroborating studies that we've also gotten a ton weaker, e.g. studies that look at average grip strength.
There are links to the source study in that article.
The author simply fails to understand that BMI is a helpful indicator for population metrics, and contorts into crazy positions to fill out a “top 10” list
Additionally, BMI is imprecise, but imprecise doesn't mean useless. If you took a random sample of people with a BMI of 40+ from across the whole population, almost none of them would be near optimal healthy weight; a random sample of 30+, still relatively few. Those few who are healthy at that BMI know it. BMI's maybe not so useful for someone who's hovering around 19 or 28, but at the extreme edges it's very indicative of body fat.
Your retort is something people repeat, because they don't seem to grasp that originally the point of the retort was when people are using BMI to discuss individuals (wrong) rather than populations (correct). This is the correct usage.
But ultimately there's little data supporting the supposition that Americans have so much muscle they're incorrectly categorized via BMI over population level samples, whereas there is plenty of data suggesting that since the 1970s and the subsidization of corn-created sugar, that Americans have gained body fat.
BMI may not apply well to you individually, but you can look around and see that there’s a worsening problem that aggregate BMI trends seem to capture.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7116789-the-strongest-sh...