Peter Attia· MD
many people like to point out that bmi is a measure of mass divided by stature it was developed by adolf kate lay who was a belgian astronomer epidemiologist statistician mathematician back in the 19th century brilliant guy um we actually named a professorship after him and i held that title i was very grateful for that opportunity back when i was at the university of alabama at birmingham before i came to iu and caitlyn made it you would think that bmi that is or rather the mass of a three-dimensional object ought to increase in proportion to the cube of a linear dimension and if in fact we were spheres of uniform density that would be true but i don't know about you i'm not a sphere of uniform density so it turns out not to work that way exactly turns out that empirically it works closer to the square for adult humans kate lay realized that and so he said take mass or weight over stature squared the square of stature that's then it was called kate lays index now we call it bmi