Pennington Biomedical Research Center stepped into the consumer products evaluation arena with a study that shows the Body feature in Amazon Halo can be as accurate as the methods doctors use to measure body fat percentage.
“Body fat percentage is a better overall indicator of health and longevity than weight or body mass index alone. BMI offers a general indication of whether a person has obesity. Physicians use BMI because it’s fast and costs next to nothing,” said Steven Heymsfield, MD, professor and director, Metabolism and Body Composition Laboratory at Pennington Biomedical and co-primary investigator of the study. “The drawback to BMI is that it can’t distinguish between fat and muscle. Our study shows that the Body feature offers consumers an easy, accurate way to measure body composition.”
The study evaluated the body composition of 134 participants using the Body feature, consumer and professional models of smart scales, air displacement plethysmography, and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) – the clinically accepted gold standard for measuring body fat percentage. The Body feature proved more accurate than smart scales and air displacement plethysmography and was comparable to DXA.