Measuring nutritional status in adults

An ideal index of nutritional status, for any age group, should meet the following requirements:

It must be correlated with body fat and protein stores.
It must be correlated with health or functional outcomes.
It must be simple to obtain and interpret in the field. It must also be accurate (close to the true value), valid (represent what it is thought to represent) and precise (repeatable).

In addition to these requirements, as adult height is largely determined by an individual's genotype and childhood nutritional experience ¹⁵, it follows that if an index is to reflect current nutritional status in adults it must be independent of height.