Around the turn of the twentieth century, insurance companies started using a measure called the Quetelet index—later rebranded as the body mass index, or BMI, which is how we know it today—to categorize people as “normal weight,” “overweight,” and “underweight,” with “normal” being considered ideal. There were (and still are) many problems with that equation: for one, it was developed in the 1830s by a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet as a way to test whether the laws of probability could be applied to human beings at the population level. It was created as a statistical exercise,
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