I’ve long wondered why men and women have both been assigned the same BMI value for being overweight, because it’s obvious that if you take your average, normally-built man and woman of the same height, the man will be heavier. Despite this fact, the CDC and WHO use the same Body Mass Index (BMI) threshold for both men and women to determine whether they are overweight.
Exactly why these organizations choose to do so has not been explained, but it may be because Western women have grown increasingly fat since the 1960s. In fact, in a fifteen year period from the early 70s to the late 80s the BMI difference between men and women narrowed by nearly a half a point.
Does this mean that larger women are more natural? Was it the evil patriarchy that was keeping women thinner, healthier and more attractive?
Probably not, but the refusal to honestly address the fact that today’s women are significantly fatter than men probably has a lot to do with the rise of female power. The last thing women want to hear is that they are fat. No, they’d rather Dr. Phil tell them how beautiful and special they are from his pulpit on TV as they gobble down cookies and ice cream. If some mean old government agency suggested they had a weight problem there’d be hell to pay, so the figures are manipulated to assuage their self esteem.
Fortunately, I found a doctor who is willing to set the record straight. Steven B. Halls, who runs a simple website with a number of health charts and calculators, has written an article discussing the problem with assigning the same BMI standards to men and women:
Statistical fairness
One problem with the current CDC & WHO threshold of “overweight” at 25 kg/m2 is that it is unfair to men. It labels a larger percentage of the Male population as overweight. If the male threshold were higher, or the female threshold were lower, then the proportion of overweight men and women would be more equal.
A Danish study6 used a purely statistical method to define alternate BMI thresholds for overweightness, with equality between men and women as an important statistical criteria. It suggested a BMI of 27.2 kg/m2 for men and 25.0 kg/m2 for women, as overweight thresholds. The “gap” between these figures is 2.2 kg/m2.
So, in the interests of equality, there should be a gap. However, it’s unlikely that this change will be made because, after all, equality would favor men in this case, and suggest that our women are fatter on the balance than men.
