There is good news for some people in the high-BMI crowd as a latest study has found that nearly 54 million Americans, who were earlier labeled as obese or overweight based on their body mass index (BMI), are actually healthy, if you look deeply.

The findings from the University of California, Los Angeles researchers have appeared in the International Journal of Obesity. The findings have revealed that employers could potentially burden people with wrongly high health insurance costs on the basis of a deeply defective measure of actual health.

Lead author A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychologist at UCLA, said this must be the last nail in the coffin for BMI.

You can calculate your body mass index by dividing your weight by the square of your height. As per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 18.5 to 24.9 BMI is considered ‘healthy’, 25 to 29.9 an overweight BMI, and 30 and above is an obese BMI. The calculation has been noted as a bit more nuanced way of measuring health as compared to weight solely.

However, over time, researchers have started suspecting that people with so-called healthy BMIs can be quite unhealthy and the ones having high BMIs can in fact be in a quite good shape.

Tomiyama said, “The public is used to hearing 'obesity,' and they mistakenly see it as a death sentence. But obesity is just a number based on BMI, and we think BMI is just a really crude and terrible indicator of someone's health”.

It could be a quite big deal mainly since the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has lately proposed rules, allowing employers to penalize employees for about 30% of their health insurance expenses in case they don’t meet 24 health criteria, including meeting a specific BMI.

In case BMI doesn't rightly reflect health, then the ones with high numbers potentially may be overcharged without any reason.