I was talking to a friend this week who was entertaining me with a half-hearted notion that he should gain 20 pounds so that he could more quickly receive a coronavirus vaccine. Comical as this may sound, in more than a dozen states, the qualifications to receive a coronavirus vaccine include obesity. The condition, which is suffered by nearly half of the nation, is defined as having a body mass index of at least 30.
As you might remember from grade school, BMI is a semiofficial measure of weight and obesity. It is simply a ratio, calculated by a body’s mass divided by a body’s height, squared. What you might not know, and I certainly didn’t until this week, is that the bloody thing is almost 200 years old. Its Belgian inventor, the mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, devised the quotient sometime between 1830 and 1850 as a part of his study of social physics, which is the science of understanding and modeling the behavior of crowds. Quetelet’s index wasn’t coined “BMI” until more than a century after its creation. American researcher Ancel Keys used the quotient in a 1972 study, and just 13 years later, the National Institutes of Health adopted the BMI definition of obesity that we still labor under today.
Given the fact that BMI is just a simple ratio meant for shorthand modeling, it is obviously a less than perfect calculation when applied to people. Muscle is more dense than fat, so a person’s overall weight can only tell us so much. Moreover, some evidence suggests that other formulations, such as the waist-hip ratio, have a more pure predictive power of physical health.
Yet such a crude determination of objective bodily perfection is nothing new. In the earliest civilizations, having a heavier body weight, specifically for men, was held as the social ideal, not for any aesthetic reasons but because being overweight meant you were overfed and thus had the money and position to live a more luxurious lifestyle, as opposed to working in the fields.
For their part, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the proportions of the “golden ratio” (1:1.618), a mathematical formula they applied to everything from art to architecture. The Greek sculptor Phidias used the ratio in most of his works, and the exterior facade of the great Parthenon in Athens was heralded as the embodiment of this perfect ratio for a rectangle in architecture. The golden ratio, or as Leonardo Da Vinci called it, the “divine proportion,” was said to have been inspired by the aesthetic ideal of the various proportions of the human body, thus provided by nature. It is represented in much of the male statuary from ancient Athens. Da Vinci later used the ratio in his Mona Lisa and even in calculating his own bodily paragon in the form of his legendary Vitruvian Man.
Perhaps the CDC would like to make Da Vinci’s bodily index part of their vaccine qualification plan as well?
