Rethinking BMI: Grip Strength Could Be Better 💪

Seth Rogen and Jalen Hurts have basically the same BMI. Both would be classified as overweight, bordering on obese. But one has a dad bod and the other is an elite NFL quarterback built like a tank. BMI can't tell the difference because it only looks at weight and height, completely blind to whether that weight comes from muscle or fat. And that distinction matters enormously for your health and longevity.

A new study following over 90,000 people for 13 years found something fascinating: grip strength might be one of the best simple measures we have of actual health risk. People with the strongest grips were 20% less likely to develop obesity-related diseases and 13% less likely to die over the study period. Why grip strength? Because unlike biceps or quads, most people don't specifically train it. It's a purer window into your underlying muscle mass and metabolic health.

The takeaway isn't to start squeezing stress balls. Grip strength isn't protective in itself, it's a marker. But it's telling us something important: we need to stop treating weight as a single number and start understanding fat and muscle as two separate, opposing forces in the body. Until we have better, cheaper ways to measure both, a simple handshake might tell us more about someone's health than their BMI ever could.

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