Aberdeen scientists studying evolution claim to have found a link between body fatness and physical attractiveness in humans.
Research at The University of Aberdeen predicted people would find females with a body mass index (BMI) of between 24 and 24.8 as being the most attractive.
Throughout their study they included the relationships between obesity and the future risk of death, and the future possibility of having children.
They then tested their predictions on more than 1,300 men and women who were shown 21 images of females with different levels of body fatness.they concluded that the photos of the skinniest females with a BMI of 19 were rated as most attractive.create variation, subjects were taken from 10 countries, and in all groups both males and females rated physical attractiveness very similarly.
As fatness increased above a BMI of 19, the images were rated less attractive, which matched up with the predictions.
And when subjects were asked how old they thought the people in the images were, they judged the fatter people to be older.
The results found that humans link female attractiveness to youth, as a BMI of 17 – 20 relates to the average BMI of an 18-year-old with maximal fertility and minimal risk of disease.
The link was found to be consistent across European, African and Asian test groups, and historical exposure to famine was not found to be an important factor in the study.
Professor John Speakman, of the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, led the research.
He said: “Fitness in evolutionary terms comprises two things: survival and the ability to reproduce.
“What we wanted to investigate was the idea that when we look at someone and think they are physically attractive, are we actually making that assessment based on a hard-wired evolutionary understanding of their potential for future survival and reproductive ability?
“We concluded that across all the cultures people said thin images with BMI around 19 were most attractive.
“This is probably because they used fatness to evaluate the health and future fecundity prospects of the people in the images.
“Of course in real life it’s a lot more complex because people use many other additional bits of information as well to reach a judgement.
“We chose fatness because the links between fatness and health and fecundity are much clearer, compared with other things like how clever someone is or how nice their smile is etc.
“This allowed us to generate a mathematical model of how fatness should be related to attractiveness.
“We have learned that different cultures are quite similar in the way they do these ratings — although there were some small differences like Africans also using waist to hip ratio to reach a judgement — more than Asians and Caucasians. “The common response possibly points to some common underlying biological cause.”
The study was jointly conducted by 10 research institutions from around the world and its full findings were yesterday (Tues) published in the prestigious scientific journal, PeerJ.
Dr Lobke Vaanholt (corr), who organised the University of Aberdeen component of the study, added: “Although most people will not be surprised that extreme thinness was perceived as the most attractive body type, since this prevails so heavily in media, culture and fashion, the important ad