A COMPARISON OF THE DU BOIS AND THE HARRIS AND BENEDICT NORMAL STANDARDS FOR THE ESTIMATION OF THE BASAL METABOLIC RATE

Abstract

One of the most important contributions to the science of medicine within recent years was the establishment by Lusk and Du Bois and their associates of a normal standard of heat production of sufficient accuracy to allow the general introduction of indirect calorimetry into clinical medicine.’ The historical details, which need not be repeated here, of the development of Rubner’s law of body surface into an accurate standard for the determination of the basal metabolic rate have been extensively covered in the various articles of Lusk and Du Bois and of Harris and Benedict; the former emphasize its consistencies and general applicability and the latter emphasize the point “that the metabolism or heat output of the human body even at rest does not depend on Newton’s law of cooling and, therefore, is not proportional to the body surface.” Murlin has recently demonstrated some of the fallacies in the position maintained by Benedict and his associates both by mathematical and by teleological arguments. Because of their reluctance to accept the body surface law as a basis for the establishment of normal standards for heat production Harris and Benedict, in an exhaustive mathematical consideration of the subject, developed a series of biometric correlation formulas, based on stature, body weight, sex, and age (the same factors as used by Du Bois) by which “results as good as, or better than, those obtainable from the constant of basal metab-