Doctors say if you want to know if you are too fat all you need is STRING

Using a piece of string to find out if you are in proportion might be a better way to see if you are fat than working out your Body Mass Index. Scroll down for video Because the BMI fails to take into account the weight of muscle, which is considerably greater than fat, many high class athletes are put in the same body mass grouping as individuals who do little or no exercise However the test has long been known to overestimate the danger posed to those with heavy bone structures or large muscle mass and underestimate the risk to people who carry large amounts of fat around their middle. It found one third of those checked would have been overweight if tested by the string method but were classified as normal by the BMI test. Dr Margaret Ashwell, from Oxford Brookes University was quoted as saying the study not only supported previous findings on the superiority of waist to height over BMI but also showed the dangers BMI alone could pose when used in screening for heart risk factors. The study found that one third of those checked would have been found to be overweight by the string method but were classified as normal by the BMI test Athletes like world class sprinters who have muscly physiques can be shown to have bad health when they are at peak fitness because of inaccuracies in the BMI Body Mass Index is checked by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by how tall they are in meters squared.