Another study made headlines earlier this year for declaring that push-up abilities could predict heart disease. Stefanos Kales, a professor at Harvard Medical School, noticed that the leading cause of death of firefighters on duty was not smoke inhalation, burns, or trauma, but sudden cardiac death. This is usually caused by coronary-artery disease. Even in this high-risk profession, people are most likely to die of the same thing as everyone else.
Still, the profession needed effective screening tests to define fitness for duty. Since firefighters are generally physically fit people, Kales’s lab looked at push-ups. He found that they were an even better predictor of cardiovascular disease than a submaximal treadmill test. “The results show a strong association between push-up capacity and decreased risk of subsequent cardiovascular disease,” Kales says.
Usually when studies like these come out, pockets of experts talk about how they should “incorporate it into clinical care” or otherwise take these new metrics seriously to cut down medical costs and to monitor health in ways that are better than body weight. Then the novelty fades, and the system keeps relying on body weight. But Kales contends that metrics beyond BMI and age have to be taken seriously. This is driven in part by the Americans With Disabilities Act, which mandates that people not be discriminated against in occupational settings based on BMI or age.
“Before the ADA, a fire or police department might have a BMI standard where they won’t accept you,” Kales says. “Now they want functional standards.” That is, they want to know whether you can do the job—not if you’re fat.
The push-up study could reasonably extend beyond firefighters. “Push-ups are another marker in a consistent story about whole-body exercise capacity and mortality,” says Michael Joyner, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic whose work focuses on the limits of human performance. “Any form of whole-body engagement becomes predictive of mortality if the population is large enough.”
That is to say: Health is not simply about push-ups. There’s also nothing magic about grip strength or walking speed. But these abilities tend to tell us a lot. Firefighters with higher push-up capacity were more likely to have low blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood sugar, and not to smoke. People with the lowest grip strengths were more likely to smoke and have higher waist circumference and body-fat percentage, watch more TV, and eat fewer fruits and vegetables.
Essentially, these quick metrics serve as surrogates that correlate with all kinds of factors that determine a person’s overall health—which can otherwise be totally impractical, invasive, and expensive to measure directly. If we had to choose a single, simple, universal number to define health, any of these functional metrics might be a better contender than BMI.
A good metric of health should be meaningful, measurable, actionable, and durable. Body weight and BMI aren’t always meaningful or actionable—as many people who’ve tried to change theirs are aware. Other metrics require drawing blood in a doctor’s office or spending money to send saliva or feces off to a lab to get genetic-sequencing results from companies such as 23andMe or UBiome. You don’t even need to track all your steps every day, unless that’s somehow fun. A single minute of push-ups or grip strength could track progress just as well.
Granted, Joyner and other experts I heard from estimated that the number of Americans who can do a single push-up is likely only about 20 or 30 percent. But that’s an issue of practice more than destiny. “Most people could get to the point of doing 30 or 40—unless they have a shoulder problem or are really obese,” Joyner says.
Connie’s comments:
I want to measure the quality of our diet, feces and our blood. I use fresh ginger and lemon to clean my blood which helps in the regular metabolism and bowel movement. Our diet affects our health as seen by our blood tests and bowel movements.
The sudden appearance of these bumps can look like a rash, 
