Written by Athena Nair as a Laidlaw Scholar
Why Do We Fear Fat? A Brief Overview of the History of Fatphobia and Colonialism
By Athena Nair
In today’s world, we are used to fat-shaming. We have become accustomed to the idea that weight is a measure of health. We associate fatness not only with a lack of health, but also a lack of beauty, intelligence, and personality. We often overlook these instances of discrimination, take them for granted, and use faulty science to uphold these bigoted convictions. As with many systems of oppression in our world, fatphobia is based upon a social construct. This essay investigates the creation of fatness as a construct related to health, beauty, lifestyle, class, and race. Specifically, I detail the history of fatphobia during colonialism, the creation of the BMI, and the medical industry’s adoption of racist, fatphobic principles based on faulty data.
The BMI is considered a key signifier of health today, but it wasn’t created as a measure of health in the first place. In 1832, Belgian astronomer, sociologist, and statistician Adolphe Quetelet created the BMI, originally dubbed “Quetelet’s Index,” out of his interest in observing average measurements of a population (Eknoyan, 2007). Though Quetelet was a scientist with many passions and interests, medicine and health was not one of them. Quetelet was interested in the L’homme moyen, which many translate to be “average man.” The true connotation of this, though, is the “ideal man” (Karasu, 2016) This distinction is crucial, because this language of an “ideal body” links the BMI to social determinism and eugenics. Many who recount the history of the BMI fail to note this nuance, instead claiming that Quetelet was only interested in the “mean of a population.” In reality, Quetelet “believed the mathematical mean of a population was its ideal” (Your Fat Friend, 2019). Of course, the population he was gathering data from were a group of upper class, thin, French and Scottish people from the 1800s.
The BMI’s path from a statistic to the doctor’s common tool is a convoluted one. Despite most people not knowing his name, Quetelet was a widely influential figure. He is considered a founder of modern Western statistics; he organized journals and meetings across the scientific community. He became a private tutor to Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, he consulted with President Andrew Garfield about improving the U.S. Census, and he influenced thinkers such as Marx and Durkheim (Karasu, 2016). Quetelet’s work in positivist criminology paved the way for Cesare Lombroso to assert that people of color are “savages” and evolutionarily stunted. Therefore, people of color, to Lombroso and other positivist criminologists, are genetically prone to commit crimes. Additionally, Quetelet is considered to have founded the field of anthropometry which includes phrenology (part of racist pseudoscience and eugenics). Here lies a clear reason why the lens of intersectionality that Kimberlé Crenshaw offers is crucial to understanding oppression at large – colonialism has led to a subjugation of bodies of color in a variety of ways (Crenshaw, 1994).
So, how did the BMI become involved in supporting eugenics, and eventually become adopted as a measure of health, despite the measure originally having nothing to do with health? In the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century, Quetelet's Index largely faded from scientific and cultural conversation. The association between people of color and fatness, and therefore the association of fatness as inferior, continued to thrive.
One of the prime early examples of the fetishization of fatness and the creation of a spectacle around Black fat bodies is of Sarah Baartman. Baartman, born in South Africa in the late 1700s, made a deal with the heads of the house in which she worked to travel to England to be a part of shows. Onlookers were excited and shocked by the exhibit of Sarah Baartman, and they ogled and exclaimed at her large buttocks. The exploitation of Baartman’s body continued long after her death at the age of 26 – someone who had onced danced with Baartman at a private party created a cast of her body. He then dissected the body, “preserved her skeleton and pickled her brain and genitals,” all of which were on public display until 1974 (Parkinson, 2016).
The supposed distinction in size between white/European and African and South Asian bodies was further bolstered by colonization. Colonizers stole a variety of rich foods from around the globe to bring back to their countries, and due to this rapid introduction of new food (and much of it) to the upper class, Europeans began to worry about their weight and pride themselves upon their thinness. They also linked this “epidemic” of fatness to the people they colonized. In South Asia, the British generalized heaviness to all Brahmin elites, and associated fatness with “weakness, laziness, and cowardice” (Forth, 2012). The British made assumptions based on very few facts to fit the agenda they were trying to create. For example, Ganesha is one of the many Hindu deities, known for having an elephant head, a large belly, and a love of laddoos (South Asian sweet). The British saw Ganesha as a clear example of the reverence of fatness in South Asia – they took one piece of information and ran with it. In Africa, European colonizers ascribed some pastoral people’s “disinterest in hard work as ‘obesity of mind’” (Forth, 2012).
The stories spun by European colonizers about South Asians and Africans, among other people of color, were spread across the continent through the media. Academic and scholarly journals would cite these observations as scientific evidence for racism and phrenology. Cartoonists would depict fat people of color in caricatured, garish, dehumanizing manners. Personal essays, poems such as “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling, short stories and general fiction perpetuated images of lazy, unintelligent people of color. Of course, race was a primary way of distinguishing colonizers from the colonized – so, too, was body size.
With fatphobia and racism deeply embedded in Western cultural consciousness, these systems of oppression became fundamental to capitalism in the early 1900s. Insurance companies realized they could make a profit by seizing on the fear of fat, so they associated higher weight with decreased life expectancy. They introduced weight into conversations about health, and so scales became available to use at home (Karasu, 2016). The data these claims were based on, as usual, were faulty and biased. Their sample was life insurance customers over a few years, and many participants inaccurately self-reported their height and weight. In the 1940s, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company created tables of “desirable weight,” with arbitrary and subjective measures of body frame. The table did not include age as a factor, and they were not created by health practitioners. Even still, the table was edited over the next several decades, and physicians began to use these tables to measure their patients’ weight in comparison to the ideal (Your Fat Friend, 2019).
In the 1970s, Ancel Keys collected data on men from 5 countries in an attempt to find the most effective (cost-wise too) existing measure of body fat (Quetelet’s Index, skin caliper, or water displacement). The countries were the U.S., Finland, Italy, and South Africa (which the authors noted their findings don’t apply to Bantu men) – predominantly white places, as well as Japan. They found Quetelet’s Index to be the most effective of three relatively imperfect and weak measures of body fat, and renamed it the Body Mass Index, or BMI (Keys, 2014).
The adoption of the BMI into healthcare was directly connected with the changes of definition and prevalence of “obesity.” In 1985, the National Institutes of Health changed their definition of “obesity” to be linked to people’s BMI. They refer to the tables created by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in this report, highlighting their uses and limitations (Health Implications, 1985). Notably, limitations such as the data’s lack of applicability to entire populations were not mentioned in regard to the BMI, despite the BMI having similar limitations. In 1998, the NIH edited their definitions of “overweight” and “obese” once more, lowering the threshold of “obesity” significantly. CNN aptly wrote that the “federal government adopted a controversial method for determining who is considered overweight” (CNN, 1998), though this indignation has left from cultural consciousness as we have gotten used to the BMI.
The BMI is not only inaccurate, it is harmful in the way it is being wielded. Various studies have pointed out the ways in which the BMI fails to account for racial and gender minorities. It overestimates health risks for Black people, underestimates health risks for Asians, and does not account for sex-based differences (The Endocrine Society, 2009; Racette, 2003). With all of its harms and its lack of validity and reliability, it is time for doctors to leave this tool behind. Not only, that – we as individuals, communities, and as a society must reckon with the history of fatphobia, and actively dismantle images and messages that undermine fat folks and people of color. We need a new, inclusive definition of health and beauty, and we need our systems of health, justice, education, and more to support these initiatives.
Sources
“Who's Fat? New Definition Adopted.” CNN, Cable News Network, 17 June 1998, http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "anthropometry". Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Mar. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/science/anthropometry.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” In: Martha Albertson Fineman, Rixanne Mykitiuk, Eds. The Public Nature of Private Violence. (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 93-118.
Eknoyan, G. “Adolphe Quetelet (1796 1874) the Average Man and Indices of Obesity.” Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, pp. 47–51., https://doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfm517.
Forth, Christopher E. “Feature: Race, Bodies and - JSTOR.” JSTOR, Oxford University Press, 2012 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23277787.
Health Implications of Obesity. NIH Consens Statement Online 1985 Feb 11-13; 5(9):1-7 https://consensus.nih.gov/1985/1985Obesity049html.htm.
Karasu, Sylvia R. “Adolphe Quetelet and the Evolution of Body Mass Index (BMI).” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 18 Mar. 2016, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-gravity-weight/201603/adolphe-quetelet-and-the-evolution-body-mass-index-bmi.
Keys, A., et al. “Indices of Relative Weight and Obesity.” International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 43, no. 3, 2014, pp. 655–665., https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyu058.
Parkinson, Justin. “The Significance of Sarah Baartman.” BBC News, BBC, 7 Jan. 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35240987.
Racette, Susan B, et al. “Obesity: Overview of Prevalence, Etiology, and Treatment.” Physical Therapy, vol. 83, no. 3, 2003, pp. 276–288., https://doi.org/10.1093/ptj/83.3.276.
The Endocrine Society. "Widely Used Body Fat Measurements Overestimate Fatness In African-Americans, Study Finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 June 2009. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090611142407.htm.
Your Fat Friend. “The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI.” Medium, Elemental, 18 Oct. 2019, https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-of-the-bmi-7d8dc2aa33bb.