While a woman’s hips tell men about her omega-3 stores, her waist conveys a still rich messages. In addition to having more omega-3, women with smaller waists are also less likely to have been pregnant before (or currently), so their childbearing potential is still untapped. They also less likely to die in child birth,,,
Because small waist conveys so many desirable qualities, men like them to be extremely small. There is, in fact, no lower limit to waist size that men conjure. The imaginary women they depict in comic books and animated films have hips like playmate but impossibly small waists. Jessica Rabbit’s waist is less than 40 percent of her hip size.
But unfortunately, today’s average American woman is 20 pounds heavier than in 1970. Only one young woman in six has a BMI less than 20, and only one in 20 has a waist-hip ratio less than 70 percent. What’ gone wrong?
The same innate drive that makes women store fat may also be causing them to gain extra weight now. American women (and men, and children) are now seriously deprived of omega-3 fat. Food companies eliminate them from products in order to extend shelf life. But as the omega-3 in the American food supply has been shrinking, we’ve been getting much more of another fat, omega-6, which is cheaper, more stable—and undermines our ability to get enough omega-3.
Omega-6 fat is not inherently bad, our bodies need roughly equal amount of these fats, and for over 95 percent of human history, they were in balance. But our diet now supply 20 to 25 times more omega-6 than omega-3. Since it takes certain amount of DHA to build a human infant’s brain, a woman today needs more pounds of that low DHA body fat. This may help explain why American women weight 20 pounds more than they did 40 years ago, and 40 pounds more than Japanese women of the same height.
Back to 50 years ago, few books were about weight losses and people were feeling comfortable about their weight. Today, even the slender women are dissatisfied with their bodies. A woman’s images of the idea figure are not subjected to the same evolutionary pressure as a man’s is; it is much more influenced by the culture she lives in.
Today’s super-skinny fashion model is actually quite different from the women men find most attractive. At 70 inches she is taller than 99 percent of American women, and her weight of 115 pound gives her a BMI of just 16.5, lower than that of most women in food –poor country like Bangladesh. Two thirds of fashion models have BMIs of less than 17, compared with just 6 percent of playmates. While the fashion model’s waist is larger than a playmate’s, her hip size is much smaller relative to her height, just 46 percent vs. 53 percent in playmates.
If the fashion ascendance of super thin women has not had a lasting impact on women’s body shape, it has certainly had a huge impact on women’s patterns of thinking: Women are much less satisfied with their own bodies after viewing images of the super-skinny models featured in women’s fashion magazines.
More significantly, this ascendance has skewed women’s perceptions of what men like. When asked to predict how men will rate women of different body shapes, women choose thinner figures than men do, figures more like fashion models than like playmates. Here is the kicker: The shapes that men actually choose are closer to those of the women making such predictions! In other words, women are usually more like men’s ideals that they realize, so that losing weight may not make them any more attractive to men.
