Human bipedalism and body-mass index.

ABSTRACT: Body-mass index, abbreviated as BMI and given by M/H ² with the mass M and the height H, has been widely used as a useful proxy to measure a general health status of a human individual. We generalise BMI in the form of M/H ^p and pursue to answer the question of the value of p for populations of animal species including human. We compare values of p for several different datasets for human populations with the ones obtained for other animal populations of fish, whales, and land mammals. All animal populations but humans analyzed in our work are shown to have p ≈ 3 unanimously. In contrast, human populations are different: As young infants grow to become toddlers and keep growing, the sudden change of p is observed at about one year after birth. Infants younger than one

SUBMITTER: Yi SD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5473922 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature