If your body mass index (BMI) is normal, it doesn’t mean you are healthy. A new study has suggested that BMI calculations are crude, and not accurate health assessment, and people who have been labeled obese or overweight could be healthy.

The study by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) stated that BMI is an inaccurate method of determining if a person is healthy or not. More than 54 million people in the America who have higher BMIs were previously mislabeled as overweight, or unhealthy, as per the study published in the International Journal of Obesity.

A BMI is a method that compares an individual’s weight to his height. It considers a person’s weight and weight, and decides whether the individual is healthy, overweight or obese. But, the method doesn’t differentiate between muscle, bones, fat and water. In addition, It doesn’t considers age, ethnicity, physical fitness, and gender.

“Many people see obesity as a death sentence. But the data show there are tens of millions of people who are overweight and obese and are perfectly healthy”, said A. Janet Tomlyama, a researcher from the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author of the study.

The study also concluded that more than 20 million people who were considered as ‘normal’ after seeing their BMI measure are actually unhealthy. On the other side, approximately 2 million Americans who were labeled as ‘very obese’ after considering their BMIs turned out to be healthy.

According to the researchers, they found that around 34 million people who were considered as ‘overweight’ were also healthy. The study concluded that a human’s health is not just based on weight. There are several other factors that should be included to tell if a person is healthy or not, it added.