Why does BMI have units of kg/m^2 when we are three dimensional? Wouldn’t kg/m^3 or g/cm^3 be more accurate?
In: 100
It has units of kg/m^2 because it is weight over height squared, basically.
On a population level it works: BMI has a correlation with various things, and because it works off data you *have*, it is better than no measure.
On an individual level it is not a good measure of obesity: it just isn’t a very good measure of body fat percentage for people who are not of average height. Better individual measures exist but they use data most people haven’t provided, like the circumference of the neck or a caliper measurement.
In other words, your surmise that something without the right units is not a good measure is a decent engineering intuition.
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