BMI (Body Mass Index) Is Racist According to the ABC – What?!
Channel: Daily Insight
Date: 02/01/2022

I’ve stopped watching the news this year, but being the new year and all, yesterday I was searching for a BMI calculator on Google and one of the search results was this article, “The really old, racist and non-medical origins of the BMI – ABC”. “Surely not”, I thought. Surely an inanimate measure for one’s body size can’t be racist, but no, according to the ABC, it is.

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Although I promised myself not to click on stupid, clickbaity titles this year, I just couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to know how they were considering this to be racist. Scrolling down to the first mention of racism, I found this section, “The BMI's really old, non-medical and racist origins”. It was created by a Belgian mathematician in the 1830s. His thinking went that you could take thousands of measurements, compare them, and find the ideal weight. But there were big limitations to Quetelet's experiment. For one, all the participants were western European men. Okay, my first thought is that in 1830s Belgium, I doubt there were many non-western Europeans. Moving on. “Where the BMI falls short”. If you're looking at the whole population, BMI is wonderful, but at an individual level, it really falls down. Using the BMI, most elite athletes would be classified as overweight. Okay. A bigger flaw is the natural differences in body types between people of various ethnicities, genders and ages. When the test was devised in the 1800s it only took into account white European bodies. In the centuries since, research has revealed that a healthy weight is different for certain ethnicities. For example, Polynesians are generally healthier at a higher weight range, while for people of Asian descent, a lower BMI is seen as optimal. Similar caveats exist for women. There’s this Health at Every Size movement, which promotes acceptance of all bodies and rejects concepts like the BMI. And that’s it. I read through the entire article and that’s the only mention of racism. I don’t know ABC, it seems a bit of a stretch to label a body measurement tool like BMI as “racist”. Sure, highlight its deficiencies, but is there any need to use a loaded term like “racist”? It should be noted that the World Health Organisation still recommends BMI as a measure of body size. What do you think? Is BMI racist, or is the ABC trying to flame racial tensions rather than trying to bring people together?

#BMIracist #bmi #BodyMassIndex