The “ideal weight” tables that sat in doctors’ offices for decades weren’t built by health researchers – they came from actuaries at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in 1943, based on the mortality data of the company’s own policyholders, used to price life insurance premiums.
The sample was far from representative: mostly white, above-average-income Americans who could afford life insurance in the first place. The “waist” and “frame size” figures behind the tables were often self-reported, with no clear way to verify them.
Even so, the tables were treated as a general medical benchmark for decades, until they were heavily criticized for their shaky statistical foundation – exactly the kind of number that starts to feel official simply because it gets repeated often enough.
Today’s BMI has its own limits, but at least it didn’t start life as an insurance form.
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