Donna Ryan, professor emerita at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, thinks BMI is here to stay, though she says doctors should change their approach to it. “BMI is part of the core measures in the electronic health record,” she wrote in an email. But, she added, doctors should expand their limited understanding of the measure to include racial and ethnic variation, and should stop using it to assess individual body fat status. “They all passed the MCATS, they can certainly learn the nuances of using BMI as a screening tool and then make a clinical diagnosis based on health assessment.”