While critics of the fashion industry usually claim the glamorization of super-skinny models encourages eating disorders and body-image issues, a new study insists that promoting images of heavy models is actually worse for women's health in the long run.
Basically, the research posits that the use of overweight models on fashion runways and in ads may encourage women to get fat by influencing them to think that being overweight is normal and healthy.
Study: Stop Making People Think Being Fat Is Ok
In their paper Thinness and Obesity: A Model of Food Consumption, Health Concerns, and Social Pressure, Dr. Davide Dragone and Dr. Luca Savorelli of the University of Bologna in Italy wrote:
"To promote chubby fashion models when obesity is one of the major problems of industrialized countries seems to be a paradox.
Everyone has to trade off in life a number of things like the pleasure of eating and going to the gym as a cost, so if you just fix the average healthy weight, then maybe you will throw up some incentives to be thin."
Obesity-Related Healthcare Costs Are Skyrocketing
The research, which was recently presented at the Royal Economic Society's annual conference in London, claims that countries where the fashion industry is more accepting of plus-size models (like the U.S.) have heavier populations.
Drs. Dragone and Savorelli concede that the fashion industry is a powerful trend-setter that influences society's behavior and standards of beauty, so the increased use of heavy models may desensitize people to the reality that being overweight is bad for one's health.
The researchers specifically took issue with a 2006 agreement between the fashion industry and Italy, Spain and Germany to require a higher minimum size for models and to increase the production of larger sizes for fashion labels.
"When reading the content of the agreements, it is clear that both the government and the fashion industry agree that fashion is a powerful trend-setter. It not only influences what clothes, styles and colors are trendy, but also determines how a person should appear to be desirable.
If being overweight is the average condition and the ideal body weight is thin, increasing the ideal body weight may increase welfare by reducing social pressure. By contrast, health is on average reduced, since people depart even further from their healthy weight.
Given that in the US and in Europe people are on average overweight, we conclude that these policies, even when are welfare-improving, may foster the obesity epidemic."
Basically, the researchers claim that promoting a healthy-weight ideal benefits society as a whole because seeing skinny models may influence people to watch their weight, and this will result in lower overall healthcare costs.
In 2008, the medical costs of treating obesity-related diseases in the United States totaled some $147 billion.
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