Study shows that by using BMI we're massively underestimating the amount of obese people in society. Link to study BMI characterized 26% of the subjects as obese, while DXA indicated that 64% of them were obese. 39% of the subjects were classified as non-obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by DXA. BMI misclassified 25% men and 48% women.  Yep, you read that right. When using bodyfat (DXA is a type of xray techinque that can be used to measure bodyfat) to classify obesity rather than BMI the rate of obesity more than doubled in the test subjects. This study was done between 1998 and 2009, which explains the "low" rate of obesity amongst the subjects. Take a moment and think about the current obesity rate, and then double it. Do you feel your hope for the future drain away? When adding overweight people to that rate, us normal people are probably less than 10% of the population, or maybe even less than 5%. When do you think we will be the 1%? Later on in the article the authors suggest new BMI cutoff points for obesity (not overweight!) at 24 for women and 28 for men. Makes me wonder where the cutoff for being overweight would be...