Determinants of the Body-Mass Index in Canada and England: An Analysis Using Relative Distributions

Rationale:The body-mass index (BMI) is commonly used to identify individuals who are underweight, of ideal weight, overweight or obese. The rise in the proportion of individuals classified as obese or overweight has become a health and economic concern for developed countries. A problem with this classification is that it does not consider the whole of the BMI distribution, and changes in BMI which do not cross a category boundary will be …