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Jeff Dewey's avatar

It’s a sad day when a one time respectable publication comes out with balderdash like that. “Scientific” American is now an oxymoron.

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PJ Carlino's avatar

In the Scientific American article, the authors do not claim the BMI is racist. Its a well reasoned essay on the history of white medical practitioners' racist attitudes toward Black women's bodies in which they claimed larger bodies were proof of a Black inferiority. The authors claim that those racist attitudes toward larger Black women continue to the present and mask how interrelated social factors impact black women's health. In this piece, Maratos-Flier et al are incorrect when they claim the Huffington Post article does not include commentary from medical scientists. Jennifer Gaudiani provides convincing commentary. She is an MD, Board Certified in Internal Medicine who completed an undergraduate degree at Harvard and medical school at Boston University School of Medicine, and her internal medicine residency and chief residency at Yale. She runs a clinic that treats eating disorders and explains that BMI can be used as a tool to diagnose health, but that some doctors use it in racist ways when they don't go beyond obesity to investigate the health of Black women. The title of the Huff Post piece was a poor choice. The BMI is not inherently racists - its a measurement number that is one indicator of health. Maratos-Flier et al miss the point that it is not the BMI scale that is being claimed as racist, but the way doctors do not go beyond the BMI in diagnosing the health of Black women that is racist.

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