During the last twenty-five years, the importance of knowing percent body fat in terms of basic health and athletic performance has been clearly recognized. This recognition coincided when NIH published, based upon their Framingham Studies, that percent body fat is an independent health risk instead of the previous grouping of body fat in the so called “Body Weight Health Risk.” Coupled with this knowledge, two alternate technologies became available allowing percent body fat to be conveniently measured for determining percent body fat. These two technologies are: • Bio-electric Impedance Analysis (“BIA”), and • Near-infrared Interactance (“NIR”). Today there are thousands of such instruments in use throughout the world. However, there has not been a systematic evaluation of the benefits and the disadvantages of these two competing technologies for the measurement of percent body fat. This Technical Note provides a brief summary of extensive research that was performed at our institute to evaluate both of the techniques.

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