ABSTRACT
Obesity is characterized as the excessive accumulation of adipose tissue that is of sufcient magnitude to impair health.6 Measuring adiposity or body fatness in populations
and individuals can be difcult. Underwater weighing, or hydrodensitometry, has generally been considered the gold or reference standard for measuring body fatness. However, hydrodensitometry is expensive and time consuming and is logistically difcult to implement in population studies.7 Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) imaging can also be used to measure body fatness. DXA technology relies on the differential absorption of x-rays by different tissue types. The differences are captured by a detector and are used to estimate fat mass. Similar to underwater weighing, this method is also expensive.
