Looking back: BMI as a measure of body fatness: Age- and sex-specific prediction formulas. Thirty years later

This paper was based on measurements conducted at the department of human nutrition at the Agricultural University in Wageningen the Netherlands. The original ideas were from Paul Deurenberg who was an assistant professor specialised in methodologies to assess body composition and energy metabolism. Paul Deurenberg was the supervisor of two PhD students: Jan A Weststrate (1985–1988) and me (1983–1986) together with the help of many other colleagues and students performed large series of anthropometric measurements of people from all ages who were enrolled in different projects on body composition. In all, it took almost more than five years to complete all measurements in 1229 individuals. In all of these people we measured, apart from a detailed set of anthropometric measurements, body density by underwater weighing.