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  • 2016-04-18 (xsd:date)
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  • Do Studies Show That Women with Big Butts are Smarter and Healthier? (en)
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  • On 30 October 2013, the web site Elite Daily published an article that quickly became accepted social media fact: That reporting featured a study supposedly documenting that women with big butts are smarter and healthier than their flat-bottomed counterparts: That article didn't directly link to the research in question but instead cited a 12 January 2010 ABC News piece about the same study, which made less bombastic claims: Elite Daily didn't mention the age of the original research at the time their article was published in 2013, and neither did Cosmopolitan UK when they rehashed the old news as recent information in February 2016. The latter publication also didn't go into much detail about the research, simply referencing famous people with big buttocks and the strategic consumption of cookies: The claim popped up again in April 2016 on health and lifestyle blogs, framed as a novel new discovery: The research on which these reports were based (which was rarely linked to by these stories) was often portrayed as breaking scientific news, using the same facile summaries: As noted earlier, this news repatedly rehashed as welcome health information for curvy women wasn't new at all. Researchers from Oxford University published the far less sexy-sounding Gluteofemoral Body Fat as a Determinant of Metabolic Health in the International Journal of Obesity way back on 12 January 2010. That research was a review (not a study), and it began by stating that the proportion of abdominal to gluteofemoral body fat, as measured, for example, by the waist-to-hip ratio, correlates with obesity-associated diseases and mortality and is a stronger cardiovascular risk marker than BMI. In other words, the issue is not how much fat is deposited, but where. That focus was reflected in the study's conclusion, which reiterated that gluteofemoral adipose tissue potentially offers cardiovascular benefits and merits further research: No portion of the Journal of Obesity's review definitively stated that women with big butts were healthier or smarter than other women, and the authors simply contrasted findings about gluteofemoral fat versus abdominal fat (while other body types, or absence of either kind of fat, were not mentioned): That research largely pertained to waist-to-hip ratio and not just the presence of large derrieres. The same physiological profile was examined by the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2007 research [PDF] published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Again, in that research waist-to-hip ratio (rather than big butts) was the scientific focus: So, research undertaken in 2010 contrasting central obesity with gluteofemoral fat stores was widely misinterpreted several years later to suggest that women with big butts were smarter and healthier than other women. In fact, the research simply reviewed already-published data about different types of obesity and suggested further study based on a collected series of prior findings, and no portion of the 2010 review undertaken at Oxford University pertained to intellect. Research published in 2007 and 2008 similarly looked at waist-hip ratio but never claimed women with big butts were smarter. (en)
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