A study in the journal Pediatrics this week suggests that neck circumference could be a more useful measure than Body Mass Index for identifying obesity in children. CNN reports:
The authors found that a 6-year-old boy with a neck circumference greater than 11.2 inches was 3.6 times more likely to be overweight or obese than a peer below that level. Using the data, they devised neck measurements at which children could be at higher association with overweight and obesity.
Body mass index, which compares someone’s height to his or her weight, is notorious for being confusingly abstract and for producing and reifying
ridiculous results
.
