An international commission made the case for focusing on body fat quantity and the illnesses people experience.

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Using body-mass index to tell who is overweight or obese is not reliable and can result in misdiagnosis, the Commission on Clinical Obesity says in a new paper in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya/ Pexels The way obesity is diagnosed needs to become more sophisticated, an international commission has concluded.

In Tuesday's issue of The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, dozens of international medical experts and people with lived experience are proposing a major change to how obesity is diagnosed because they say current medical approaches don't reliably assess an individual's health.

A crude measure of weight relative to height, BMI is commonly used to diagnose obesity—even though many experts and professional groups agree it’s an imperfect tool that on its own reveals very little about someone’s health.

That is the conclusion of a report by the global Commission on Clinical Obesity – published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology – which recommends a more nuanced approach that includes BMI as well as other measures, including waist circumference or direct fat measurement.

Relying on BMI alone to diagnose obesity is problematic as some people tend to store excess fat at the waist or in and around their organs, such as the liver, the heart or the

Obesity, long determined by the flawed metric of BMI, should be diagnosed based on other measurements, experts argue.