Regina Barber
speaker
5,506 appearances
193 recordings
8 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5d ago
Regina Barber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 125 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 33.
Appearances
You're listening to Short Wave.
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From NPR.
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You're walking into your doctor's office for your annual checkup.
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You probably fill out a form or two.
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Then your doctor starts going down a checklist, taking your temperature, blood pressure, height, and weight.
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These last two are used to figure out your body mass index, or BMI, the bane of many people's existence.
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That's used to determine your risk for a whole bunch of dangerous common health conditions like heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
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And okay, that's probably not news to you, but you know what was news to me?
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BMI was never intended for medical use.
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That's Katie Wu.
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She's a staff writer at The Atlantic who looked into BMI.
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And why, despite this origin story, researchers still found it useful.
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And over time it became a blunt way of lumping people into four groups obese, overweight, healthy weight, and underweight.
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And that's the issue a lot of regular people and doctors today have with BMI because people are really varied.
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It's complicated.
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athletes are a classic example.
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And that has issues.
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Research suggests that certain racial groups have been underscreened for type two diabetes.
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So why haven't doctors just scrapped it for something better?
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And in an attempt to change that, experts have started considering another factor when deciding BMI cutoffs.
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Showing 1–20 of 5,506 · page 1 of 276
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