Body Mass Index has been used in recent decades as a referendum on individual health. But it was never meant to be.
The Body Mass Index was invented nearly 200 years ago. Its creator, Adolphe Quetelet, was an academic whose studies included astronomy, mathematics, statistics, and sociology. Notably, Quetelet was not a physician, nor did he study medicine. He was best known for his sociological work aimed at identifying the characteristics of l’homme moyen — the average man — whom, to Quetelet, represented a social ideal.
Quetelet was Belgian, publishing works in Western Europe during the early 19th century — a boom time for racist science. He is credited with co-founding the school of positivist criminology, “which asserted the dangerousness of the criminal to be the only measure of the extent to which he was punishable.” That positivist school laid the groundwork for criminologists like Cesare Lombroso, who believed that people of color were a separate species. Homo Criminalis, Lombroso argued, were “savages” by birth, identified by physical characteristics that he claimed linked them to primates. For Lombroso, people of color were some kind of subspecies, congenitally driven to commit crimes. In addition to paving the way for Lombroso’s work, Quetelet is also credited with founding the field of anthropometry, including the racist pseudoscience of phrenology.
Quetelet believed that the mathematical mean of a population was its ideal, and his desire to prove it resulted in the invention of the BMI, a way of quantifying l’homme moyen’s weight. Initially called Quetelet’s Index, Quetelet derived the formula based solely on the size and measurements of French and Scottish participants. That is, the Index was devised exclusively by and for white Western Europeans. By the turn of the next century, Quetelet’s l’homme moyen would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent, and as a scientific justification for eugenics — the systemic sterilization of disabled people, autistic people, immigrants, poor people, and people of color.
While Quetelet’s work was used to justify scientific racism for decades to come, he was clear about one aspect of the BMI: it was never intended as a measure of individual body fat, build, or health. For its inventor, the BMI was a way of measuring populations, not individuals — and it was designed for the purposes of statistics, not individual health.
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