A STUDY OF THE McCLOY METHOD FOR DETERMINING NORMAL WEIGHT

Abstract

Ever since Emerson (1) began his nationwide attempt to improve the nutrition of American children by bringing them up to weight, physicians and other health workers have realized that there are fallacies in the method. One of the greatest of these is that the use of standard tables based on averages for age, height, and weight gives only a wide zone of normality and necessarily introduces errors into the determination of standard weights for children having skeletal builds which differ from the average. Numerous attempts have been made to work out more accurate methods for determining normal weight which would make use of other skeletal measurements besides height. As early as 1886 Bornhardt (2) used chest circumference, together with height, in the prediction of the body weight of adults. In 1919, Dryer (3) used chest girth and stem length. Of these two methods Gray and Root (4) found the latter more accurate in predicting the normal weight of adults. In preparing his ideal weight tables for boys, Gray (5) used an average of weight for stem and weight for chest. Lucas and Pryor (6) advocated the use of bi-iliac diameter and height and in 1936 Pryor (7) published her width-weight tables. These have recently (8) been revised to make use of measurements of bi-iliac diameter, chest width (nipple level), and height. The above workers did not attempt to correct their measurements for subcutaneous fat. As McCloy (9, p. 67) points out, the inclusion of fat would introduce errors which would increase in proportion to the thickness of the fat over the bones involved.