to think this BMI calculator is bollocks?

[onemiddlefinger]

I'm not particularly concerned with my DS's weight but just after reading another thread I went and checked the NHS BMI calculator and apparently he is VERY OVERWEIGHT!!!

He certainly is big but he is also very tall for his age (2yrs 3 mnts), when recently seeing a pediatrician (for another reason) I did ask if there is anything we should be worried about regarding his size (way over the 99th percentile in weight and height for his age) and she assured that he was in proportion and he was fine. So how do these BMI calculators work?
I find this result to be a bit shocking and complete bollocks at the same time.

Wfrances, if you have a specialist looking after your child is it specifically for diet issues or is it for unrelated matters? Personally, I would be paying serious attention to activity levels and nutrition if my child was as big as the 1971 Gloop barring any overriding medical issues.

CactusAnnie - she a teen under 16 and takes after her dad's racing snake build. She's on the bottom end of the healthy range (always has been, ever since birth), and I kept adding kilogrammes to her weight to see how much she would need to weigh to be at the top end of the healthy range and it went up by 22kg.

Not being able to see a 2 year old's ribs is not a concern, that's for older kids - certainly by school age, children shouldn't carry much extra padding - but a 2 year old is still losing baby fat. The BMI calculator is probably a reasonable guide as to whether there's an issue, with the proviso that it is not that easy to measure a 2 year old's height accurately and a small error in height can distort BMI quite significantly. For adults the range of healthy weight for any given height is quite wide, but that's not the case for small children, and an inaccurate height or weight measurement can easily result in BMI being significantly over or under estimated.

If i add 1-3lb to dds weight at 2.9 its from 33rd centile to 89th.

I'm a bit worried now about my dc. She's tall for her age. I'm 5 9 and her dad is 6 2 so assumed that was why. She's about 98 per centimetre for height and 90 for weight. 18 months and 12 kilos. Do you think we might be overfeeding her? I'm slim naturally bit her dad is more prone to Wright gain. She doesn't look fat to me but how would I know?

Centile not centimetre!

YANBU they are utter bollocks... even in adults. For example all these women are actually the same weight, and the 4 in the middle look pretty much the same height to me! - lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Lt30NS7AlwI/UzvfqzkCIMI/AAAAAAACQ50/Xopf30FCaGo/w614-h415/australian-women-all-weighing-the-average-70kg.jpg

confudeinthenorth
They may be the same weight, but the shorter ones are carrying dangerous levels of visceral fat.

BMI is not bollocks - it is the clearest approximation we have for body fat percentage

and being overweight is inextricably linked with long term health problems later in life.

The picture of the Australian women is a good illustration of why BMI is a useful measure because it takes in to account height as well as weight. The short woman on the left is obviously overweight and will have a high BMI. The tall woman on the right looks toned and healthy, and her BMI will reflect that.

If the caption had claimed that they all had the same BMI, then it would be bollocks.

Let be honest, the people claiming BMI to be 'bollocks' are generally those for whom their own falls outwith healthy bounds.

It just smacks of sour grapes to me. If you wish to have that attitude yourself (as an adult) fair enough. It's when people start extending it to DCs who are too young to make their own decisions that it starts to look really unpleasant.

And fat people significantly under report the amount of sugar they are eating if asked to do a food diary
journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9570430&fileId=S1368980015000300

Press release about the research
www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR626778.aspx
The findings highlight how previous studies on sugar and obesity, which have relied exclusively on self-reported diet questionnaires to estimate sugar intake, may have been compromised and led to a misrepresentation of the facts.
people with a higher BMI tend to underreport the amount of sugar they consume.

I cant understand what they are measuring. Surely overweight people are more likely to be t2 diabetic or insulin resistant and have more sugar in urine even if they eat less?

I think it is genetics too, for example all the women in my family are chubby, tall toddlers that grow up to be 5ft or there abouts and skinny.

Babyboomersrock- a child aged two only needs a pint of milk a day, that includes what is in yoghurts and other foods, older children drinking lots of milk can gain weight

I just put my dd's information into that calculator for children that Talky linked and her bmi was 18.3 and it says on the 33rd percentile for children of her age . Very confused about what that means.

However, as she has adult dimensions (she is 14 and 5'8 probably 5'9 by now) I wonder if she gets the same bmi result in an adult calculator?

Mrs Mook is correct, if height and weight are on similar centile, following the same curve then the child is in proportion.

Children grow at different rates.

You cannot feed people to make them tall! (People would do this, let's face it)!

minty it means one third of children weigh less than her and two thirds of them weigh more, so she is just a bit below average, she sounds just fine.
18.3 as an adult makes you a wee bit on the skinny side, but different aged children are meant to be different shapes.

crispie your daughter sounds just fine, her height and weight percentiles are fairly close.

Dinosnores, thank you for your interesting post.

Could one of the people posting about 'overheight' children post a link to where this idea comes from? Just because I tried to find it myself a while back and only found some rather tentative findings from a study or two, and it's been said on here that it's well known and often happens. If I've missed something more categorical I'd really like to know as I'm interested in this issue.

Thanks penny it's so hard to know

Here.

Also here.

Well I have put my Ds weight and height in.
He is 2 years 9 months. He is on a higher percentile for weight than height, is muscular but still only comes out at bmi of 16 so I imagine a child must be quite heavy for height to get an overweight bmi.

OP perhaps you could tell us your child's height and weight.