A study has been featured with good news for some of those Americans who were mislabeled as obese or overweight considering their body mass index (BMI). The study by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), suggested that BMI mislabeled about 54 million individuals.

The individuals were considered as obese or overweight after reviewing their BMI, but when a closer look was taken, it could found that some 54 million Americans were still healthy, stated the study published in the International Journal of Obesity.

The new findings should be seen as a final nail in the coffin for BMI, said A. Janet Tomiyama, a psychologist at the university and lead author of the study.

The accurate method to calculate an individual’s BMI is by dividing his weight by the square of height in meters. As per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person is considered as healthy if his BMI is 18.5-24.9. A person with BMI more than that and less than 29.9 is considered as overweight, while one with BMI 30 or more comes under obese category, the CDC reported.

But some researchers questioned that individuals who have healthy BMI could also be unhealthy, and people with high BMI could be fit and healthy. “The public is used to hearing ‘obesity,’ and they mistakenly see it as a death sentence. But obesity is just a number based on BMI, and we think BMI is just a really crude and terrible indicator of someone’s health”, Tomiyama explained.

To solve the issue, researchers at UCLA studied data on more than 40,400 people who were part of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2005-2012. They considered participants’ blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin resistance, glucose and C-reactive protein data.

They found that many people who were tagged as obese or overweight were actually healthy.