Bien Buena – Latinas Don’t Worry About Weight

A recent report said that Latinas and African-American women don’t worry about their weight as much as whites do, they tend to see themselves as having a “normal” weight more often. And, for whatever it’s worth, they  most often “correlate their weight with their race.” About 30% of Americans who are “overweight” think they’re normal while 70% of those classified as obese think they’re just “overweight.”

This seems to me to be another one of those “Why are Latinos so fat?” stories predicated upon the holier-than-thou attitude of the BMI index. We’ve written about how lame that is before, but I’ll take this opportunity to point out that the BMI was created by and for white people, that is, people with a particular body structure.

In case you haven’t noticed, Latinos tend to have a different phenotype than whites. This isn’t true across-the-board, but as a current resident of San Antonio, Texas I will testify that there’s a shortage of men over 5′ 7″ in this town. Short, barrel-chested, short legs, long arms, there’s all kinds of different reasons a Latino wouldn’t fit nicely into a white-centric model of physical health.

Then there are all those Latina tías and abuelitas constantly trying to show their love with scrumptious cooking….