French women, thinnest in Europe, think they're
fat
PARIS (AFP) – France has by far
the highest proportion of clinically underweight women in Europe,
but only half of them think they are too thin, according to a new
study.
In other European countries the
opposite is true: the number of women in Britain, Spain and
Portugal, for example, who see themselves as seriously skinny
easily outstrips the number who actually are.
"This shows that what people
consider an ideal weight in France is lower than in other
countries," said the study's author Thibaut de Saint Pol, a
researcher at France's National Institute of Demographic studies,
which published the study Wednesday.
"If a French person who feels fat
were to go to the United States," -- which has much higher rate of
obesity -- "he probably wouldn't feel fat anymore," he told AFP in
an interview.
The study also reveals a big gap, both objective and subjective,
between sexes.
In western Europe, the mean weight of men in every country except
France and The Netherlands tips the scales into the "overweight"
category, according to World Health Organisation (WHO)
standards.
By contrast, in only three nations do women join the menfolk in
crossing that line: Britain, Greece and Portugal. And only among
the Dutch does one find more overweight women than men.
France is the one country in which both sexes are solidly in the
"normal" weight bracket, and the only one in which more than five
percent of women are offically "underweight".
The universal standard introduced by the WHO for assessing weight
is the Body-Mass Index (BMI): one's weight in kilogrammes divided
by the square of one's height in meters.
A BMI of 25-to-30 indicates being overweight, while above 30 means
one is obese. The range of normal weight is 18.5-to-24.9. (BMI
calculators can easily be found on the Internet.)
Men and women don't perceive their own deficient or excess weight
in the same way either, the study found.
"Men denigrate their own bodies when they are underweight, but when
they are overweight, they often don't see a problem," said de Saint
Pol, adding that outright obesity was another story.
"When women are underweight, they do not devalue that at all. But
as soon as they cross the line into overweight, they find that
unacceptable."
While particularly striking in France, this axiom held true across
all 15 of the European countries covered in the study.
De Saint Pol pointed to powerful cultural symbols that reinforced
these different attitudes, though it is hard to tell whether they
are more cause or effect.
For women, he said, the body is related to beauty, and beauty to
being thin.
For men, however, carrying weight is felt in oneself and perceived
in others -- consciously or not -- as projecting strength.
"This is especially true the further down one goes on the
socioeconomic ladder," he said.