Settling for subpar "could be good enough" heuristics instead of doing actual measurements is partly why people are less receptive.
Basically it'd just be telling them they're fat, and not what's their actual individual risk, and it would also make tracking progress overly difficult: what if after a year of exercice their VO2Max greatly improves while waist to hip only slightly changed ?
Overweight people already have distrust of doctors just telling them to first lose weight and dismiss their specific requests for help, additional advice vaguely based on statistics would probably not help.
Waist-to-hip ratio takes more time to change than VO2Max, it can even negatively change as a subject exercices more (e.g. they put more muscle than lose fat)
Waist-to-hip is a good predictor for generic subjects who otherwise never cared about improving their health. If the goal is to actually improve health, that assumption stops being true and you can't rely on generic heuristics anymore.
The article is about how morbidity and mortality relate to cardiovascular fitness. The fact that waist to hip ratio also is related to morbidity and mortality is a bit irrelevant in that specific context. One can imagine a person who vigorously rows every morning for 45 minutes and has a high cardiovascular fitness, but who also has a very poor diet and is thus fat.
Settling for subpar "could be good enough" heuristics instead of doing actual measurements is partly why people are less receptive.
Basically it'd just be telling them they're fat, and not what's their actual individual risk, and it would also make tracking progress overly difficult: what if after a year of exercice their VO2Max greatly improves while waist to hip only slightly changed ?
Overweight people already have distrust of doctors just telling them to first lose weight and dismiss their specific requests for help, additional advice vaguely based on statistics would probably not help.