Kathy’s Window: Why the Body Mass Index (BMI) is bull and racist
The BMI is not a viable measurement of health and discriminates against people of colour, women and fat people.
An over-50 Generation Xer sees life through a new lens: Kathy’s Window is where Kathy shares her thoughts on the world through a new lens. From growing up in the 70s and 80s to having three Generation-Z kids, and going through certain experiences in her life, she now sees the world in a different way. Ideas that were considered the norm in the 70s, 80s and 90s are now no longer socially relevant or acceptable. Kathy explores the new ideas through the lens of someone who has been on both sides of the ‘glass’.
* Please be aware that there may be triggering information in this article with regard to race and fat people.
IN my ‘thin’ days, I wanted to lose some weight and get fit. I was looking at joining a gym in my area, and in their frenzy to gain a client, the gym offered me a free assessment by a trainer and some advice on how to build my fitness. I grabbed the offer, excited to get some professional advice.
A stern, determined woman took me into a room and asked me to stand on a scale. She then asked me what I ate at every meal. At the time, I was probably about 30kg lighter than I am today. But my BMI said I was ‘overweight’. And now, my eating habits had to be analysed. In an attempt to eat healthily, I’d started eating some tree nuts as a snack. She told me I was eating too many nuts, that they were high in fat. I think I only used to eat a handful or so a day. I was a bit sceptical when she picked apart my food habits, which were mostly healthy and balanced, but she was insistent and rather pushy, saying that the scale I stood on said that the fat content in my body was way too high. She didn’t give me any tips on what exercises to do. It was all about weight. I don’t remember everything she said and did, but what stayed with me was her obvious irritation and disapproval towards me. She made me feel ‘not good enough’, and that stayed with me for years. I also stopped eating nuts.
Also read: Kathy’s Window: Are you being fatphobic?
In hindsight, I realise she was trying to earn her living as a saleslady and didn’t care how many people she hurt in the process. Maybe it was ignorance or being part of a messed-up system. The system that started with things like BMI. (The BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight by the square of their height and is used as a standard of measurement of someone’s health.)
Where it all started
I was shocked when I discovered the origins of BMI. The Body Mass Index was not a standard set up by a nutritional scientist or medical doctor but by a Belgian academic named Adolphe Quetelet (although it wasn’t called BMI at the time). Quetelet studied astronomy, mathematics, statistics and sociology and was known for his sociological work aimed at identifying the characteristics of the average (white) man. And this was 200 years ago, and he worked during a time when science was racist in Western Europe – the early 19th century. He co-founded the school of positivist criminology which led to the work of Cesare Lombroso who believed that people of colour were naturally criminals. Quetelet also founded the field of phrenology which is the study of the size and shape of the skull in reference to the functionality of the brain, and the ‘science’ was very racist. The Quetelet Index wasn’t set up to measure weight but to classify population groups.
The wrong people making the decisions
Cue ahead to the early 20th century, when weight first became an indicator of health – by insurance companies, not medical doctors or scientists. The statistics gathered for the insurance companies didn’t factor in age and were gathered from individuals’ perceptions of themselves, and every insurance company had a different standard. It became popular in the 50s and 60s for doctors to use the insurers’ rating tables to measure patients.
In the 70s, researcher Ancel Keys adopted the BMI to measure weight after gathering data from mainly ‘white’ nations, even using white South Africans and refusing to use black South Africans in his research to classify people by weight. His method of ‘obesity’ diagnosis, he admitted, was accurate about 50% of the time. He changed the name of Quetelet’s Index to ‘Body Mass Index’, thus forming the official BMI. The statistician’s index, which had been mostly forgotten, entered the realm of individual healthcare – directly counter to Quetelet’s original intentions.
Also read: I was fatphobic, and now I’m fat
Then, on a Wednesday morning in 1998, thousands of Americans woke up obese. That’s because the National Institute of Health (in the US) substantially lowered the threshold to be medically considered fat. The reason – greedy diet-drug manufacturers. Political scientist Eric Oliver reported in his book, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, that the chairman of the NIH committee that made the decision, Columbia University professor of medicine Xavier Pi-Sunyer, was a consultant of several diet-drug manufacturers and Weight Watchers International. The guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight-loss drugs.
A fake epidemic
Thus began the ‘obesity epidemic’, an idea that has spread throughout the world and even muddied medical practices.
Despite the BMI’s long hold on our culture, researchers and scientists are coming to the conclusion that moving your body and eating healthy foods influence your long-term health much more than your weight. Statistics also show that older people who are overweight often have higher life expectancies and are able to fight disease better. I’m busy reading Lindo Bacon’s book, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight. So, watch this space for more about this topic.
But also remember, your health is not always in your control, and … your worth as a human being is not connected to your health – that’s ableism which is a form of discrimination.
