What does it measure?
BIA Testing is an indirect way to measure your body's composition: how much is muscle, how much fat, how much water, how much bone. A one-time measurement provides useful information, but the real benefit comes from repeating the measurement to track body composition changes over time. If you have made a dietary or activity change in your life, BIA Testing provides a repeatable, reliable way to measure your progress.
How does is work?
When an electrical current runs through the body, or any physical mass for that matter, some of the electricity is lost (the voltage drops). This is called resistance or impedance, and can be measured very accurately and reproducibly. Well-hydrated lean tissues offer a low resistance to current. Fat and bone offer a high resistance.
Because of our cells' membrane structures, the body has another electrical characteristic called capacitance. While the body's capacitance is not directly measurable, a related characteristic called reactance is. Reactance is the opposition to an electrical current caused by capacitance. The cell membranes of muscle and organs, but not of fat cells, account for most of the body's reactance.
BIA Testing sends a safe (it cannot even be felt) electrical current through the body and then measures the impedance and reactance of the body. Based on a knowledge of which tissues cause impedance and which reactance, these values and the relation between them can be used to determine critical information about the body's composition--muscles, cells, fat, water, bone.
The BIA Analyzer we use at Slimmer Body is registered and regulated by the FDA as a class II medical device, specifically, as an impedance plethysmograph.
For more detailed information, much more detailed, please refer to these articles from the RJL Systems website, they are the manufacturer of our BIA Testing device.
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