| My ears perked up at the recent European Congress on Obesity in Malaga, Spain when a young newspaper reporter walked into the press room muttering something about “two kilos too much fat.” Apparently he’d gotten some surprising news from a body scan down in the presenters’ hall. Journalists have never been known for a lack of narcissism, so the rest of us trooped down, one by one, to see what the scanner would tell us about ourselves. Aminogram SAS, the French company marketing the device, had a booth close to Eli Lilly & Co. and Novo Nordisk, the two giant drugmakers currently duking it out for supremacy in the growing market for obesity medicines. Their ascendance is helping spur a market for medical devices as well, as companies develop diagnostic tools that can support prescriptions of the powerful new drugs. One preferred tool is something called a DEXA scan, a low-dose X-ray that measures the density of bones and assesses lean mass and fat. DEXA scanners are big enough to lie down on, and they’re not cheap — in London, a private scan can cost upwards of £150, while in New York they’re advertised online for $99 and more. Aminogram’s hand-held scanner relies instead on a method called bioimpedance, running a low-intensity electric current from the hand to the foot to measure the capacity of the body to resist the current. In practice, that meant I could hold a notched probe to my bare heel and conduct a measurement in a matter of seconds. There’s debate among doctors and scientists about the utility of bioimpedance measurements, with some arguing that one-time readings aren’t accurate enough to be the basis for treatment decisions for individual patients. “The idea is not to replace the DEXA scan,” says Etienne Gouraud, the Aminogram clinical project manager who helped measure me at the conference. “It’s just to compliment the DEXA scan, because in daily practice it’s very difficult to have a DEXA scan.” The use case would be regular monitoring to see how a patient is progressing, he says. And people shouldn’t read too much into a single scan suggesting fat mass of a couple of kilograms more than the target range, he said. With all those caveats in place, I was curious to see if my own scan showed any hidden pitfalls. The results, however, were gratifyingly dull: I am extremely well-hydrated (shout-out to my fellow water-bottle-carrying Americans) but otherwise perfectly average on every measure. Accurate or not, that felt like a relief. — Naomi Kresge | 
