What is the relationship between beauty and health?

Health And Beauty

"Weight" AND "OVERWEIGHT" sound like a determination to us - truth be told, according to a clinical perspective, this is a conclusion (review, overweight is considered at a BMI of 25, and stoutness happens at 30). Corpulence is remembered for the International Classification of Diseases, which is utilized by Russia. In 2013, the American Medical Association likewise cast a ballot to perceive weight as an illness. Not every person preferred the AMA's choice - including not all specialists. David Katz, top of the Yale University Center for Preventive Research, composed on LinkedIn: "Our capacity to get fat is essential for typical physiology. Heftiness starts with the aggregation of muscle to fat ratio, which thusly starts with the change of abundance calories into an energy hold. This is actually what a sound body with a calorie excess ought to do - store them for a blustery day. Techblogsmr, health and Beauty.

Illness is a disorder of the body. From a physiological point of view, gaining weight when the body expends fewer calories than it consumes is a natural process. An increased percentage of fat can increase the risk of certain diseases, but not necessarily provoke them. That is, fullness in itself is not a disease in the usual sense of the word for us. Moreover, the “obesity paradox” is associated with fullness: according to studies, people with a high BMI are more likely to fully recover from, for example, a heart attack than people with “normal” body weight.

We are used to believing that beauty and health are connected - which means that fullness cannot be attractive because it cannot be healthy. In fact, the question of whether fullness is healthy is very controversial, and beauty and health are not connected at all in the way we think. Early in the last century, evolutionary scientists Westermarck and Ellis began to think about how attractiveness was related to health. They considered that we consider some external signs of health to be beautiful because we are subconsciously looking for the most "quality" partner - including one with which healthy children will turn out. Recent studies say that when evaluating appearance, we take into account only fertility and not general health. So, a girl with a healthy gastrointestinal tract will not seem more attractive to us than a girl with gastritis. Techblogsmr Open innovation. 

This mechanism also works in the opposite direction: more beautiful people seem healthier to us. In psychology, this phenomenon is called the stereotype of physical attractiveness, which, in fact, is a cognitive distortion. We are afraid of rats or insects because our brain, which has existed longer than pasteurization and antiseptics, is used to perceiving them as carriers of dangerous infections. Similarly, we think that people who fit our and society's standards of beauty are healthier because we associate beauty in general with all that is good. Back in the 1970s, researchers, Dion and Miller noticed that physically attractive people are more often credited with socially approved qualities, and the qualities themselves depend on geography and the stage of development of society, but the mentioned pattern persists. For example, in Western culture, beautiful people are perceived as strong and independent, while in Eastern culture they are perceived as caring and trustworthy.

Health is wealth

According to a study published by the Public Library of Science, the more different figures we see, the easier it is for us to accept them: if we met women of different sizes in the media, we would treat them - and ourselves - more friendly and calmer. The very concepts of “beauty” and “beautiful figure” are sociocultural: at a time when rich people had the opportunity to eat a lot and not engage in physical labor, fullness was a sign of wealth and status. In modern society, in order to play sports and eat right, you need to have a certain amount of money, so thinness becomes a sign of prosperity - along with grooming or fashionable clothes. At the same time, fullness is stigmatized not only from the point of view of beauty: fat people are more often considered lazy, sloppy, weak-willed; doctors are more likely to look to the weight of such a patient for the cause of all his problems, and fat workers are more demanding than thin ones. Stereotypical ideas that a woman must be young, thin, fashionable, well-groomed, also work. The requirements for a female figure are much higher than for men, and there is much more social pressure on fat women than on men with the same complexion.

Many experts, such as Dean Ornish, whom we have already written about, believe that the stigmatization of being overweight does not make people lose weight, but leads to depression, eating disorders, and even suicide. Constant failed attempts to lose weight, along with social pressure, lead to acquired helplessness and stress. Now, it seems that society is gradually becoming more tolerant of fullness: there are plus-size models, websites, and even stores with normal plus-sized things. But the very division into "normal" and "plus" implies that plus sizes are not normal, plus-size models are often thinner than their audience - just as regular models are thinner than their own. Girls from ASOS Curve campaigns do not wear ASOS Curve clothing - it starts at size 14 on the US scale, and models wear at most 10 (or even 8).

We do not tire of repeating that the appearance of a person - whether men, or women - is his personal business, a matter of his or her comfort and self-expression. A system in which a photo of a fat girl is banned on Instagram and fat actresses play mostly comic roles makes a huge number of people unhappy. If our goal is to feel more comfortable in our own bodies and be generally happier, the habit of beauty diversity is a trait that can and should be cultivated in ourselves.