Body Mass Index became an international standard for measuring obesity in the 1980s. Before the beginning of that decade, doctors generally used weight-for-height tables (separate figures for men and women) that included ranges of weights for each inch of height. The flaw in such measurements was that they were based on weight alone and not body composition.
The public learned about BMI in the late 1990s, when the government began to promote healthy eating and exercise.
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