Doctors don’t seem to be telling patients that they’re overweight. And that’s not doing them any favors, new research suggests.
Getting an honest assessment from a physician appeared to be a key factor in whether or not study participants considered themselves overweight. Almost 37% of people whose body mass index indicated they were overweight but who didn’t report hearing that news from a physician didn’t think they had a weight problem. Same with 19% of obese participants whose physicians didn’t talk to them about weight.
By contrast, only 6% of overweight and 3% of obese participants reporting a weight-focused conversation with a physician thought they weren’t overweight. “Similarly, participants who reported that they had been told by a physician they were overweight were more likely to desire to lose weight and attempt to lose weight,” the study authors write. The research is published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina and Imperial College London used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), looking at 7,790 adults between the ages of 20 and 64 who’d had their BMI measured. People with a BMI of 25 or greater are considered overweight, and those with a BMI of at least 30 are considered obese.
Participants also answered a questionnaire as part of the NHANES survey. Only 45% of participants qualifying as overweight said they’d ever been told that by a physician. Among those with a BMI qualifying them as obese, 66% reported being told by a doctor they were overweight.
Because Americans have gotten heavier in the past few decades, many may compare themselves to friends and family and not realize they’re overweight, Robert Post, an author of the study and now an attending physician with Virtua Family Medicine Residency, tells the Health Blog. (He conducted the survey while at MUSC.)
These results suggest it’s very important for physicians to tell their patients if their BMI puts them in the overweight or obese category, even if it would seem to be obvious, he says. They can use “a neutral tone,” he says.
An accompanying editorial by Robert Baron, of the University of California, San Francisco, makes the comparison to smoking, saying that patients urged by a physician to quit were significantly more likely to do so than those who weren’t. He suggests physicians treat BMI as “a routine vital sign” and highlight troublesome results on a medical chart, then relay the information to the patient the same way they would an abnormally high blood-pressure or cholesterol reading.
The study can’t say for sure whether it was the conversation with the physician that caused those patients to alter their perceptions of their weight or attempt to lose pounds. Nor can it tell if people were successful in their attempts. One next step, Post says, is to investigate whether those conversations with physicians about weight included dietary counseling.
Further reading:
- How to Help People Lose Weight? Give ‘Em Free Meals and Money!
- If You’re Measuring Your Health Risk by Your Pant Size, Think Again
- Colorado Now the Only State With Obesity Rate Less Than 20%
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