What’s a normal body?

One of the strangest aspects of the moral panic over fat in our culture is the bizarre concept that having a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is “normal.” It certainly isn’t normal in the standard statistical sense of the word (only about a third of the adult population is in this range). It isn’t normal in the sense that everyone or even most people would have a BMI in this range if they had an optimal lifestyle, even assuming we could define that term satisfactorily. There’s no evidence for this belief, and in fact there has been no time in US history since records on the subject began to be kept that a significant majority of the populace had a “normal” body mass, as currently defined.

Another striking aspect of the current definition of “normal” is how extreme it is, in the sense that, for example, the extraordinarily thin Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin is at the edge of the “normal weight” category, even though only about one in 50 Americans are as thin as she is. But, culturally speaking, Liukin’s body is very much presented as “normal” and indeed normative, both in terms of media representations, and public health recommendations.

The tremendous popularity of “women’s” Olympic gymnastics (a sport in which being 13 years old is actually a competitive advantage) is a nice example of how certain cultural obsessions with tiny child-like female bodies end up getting reflected by what gets called science.