Mother Jones
Sam Island
It wasn’t so long ago that fat people were considered healthy. Doctors were far more worried about underweight Americans, many of whom were too poor to afford enough calories. But as farms industrialized and food became cheaper, the tables began to turn. Shortly after World War II, it became clear that eating too much food led to just as many problems as not eating enough. Insurance companies noticed that their fattest policyholders were significantly more likely to die early than those of average weight. They searched for a way to measure excess fat and hit upon a simple formula developed in 1832 by a Belgian statistician, mathematician, and astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet: Simply divide a person’s weight by the square of his height. This formula, known as body mass index (BMI), spread from insurers to health researchers and finally, in the 1980s, entered the clinical realm.
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