(Everyone that's ever dealt with fatphobia is like "Ooh! I know this one! I've trained for this!" Every Black doctor reading this is like "Yes! Our time to shine!" )

First of all, I don't like Lululemon, because the founder specifically named it that because he thought it would be hard for Japanese people to say, and he thought it would be funny to watch them try. Seriously. I don't think it's funny, but that's just me.

With that out of the way, let's talk about BMI and racism.

In the UK, Black people have higher BMIs, and live longer. Black men in the UK, live even longer than white women in the US. Black people in the UK live about 20% longer than the US.😢

UK Life expectancy for Black African women/men:
89, 83
UK Life expectancy for white women/men:
83, 79

UK Black percent "overweight": 73%
UK white percent "overweight": 63%

🙂🙃

I provided a handy visual aid, so that you can see life expectancy, with Black US folk, and Black UK folk annotated. UK is off the chart!

Let's start with the racist origins of BMI, and the lies it enables. BMI was devised by a racist non-doctor named Jaques Quetelet. He was trying to find the ideal man proportions to "study criminality." It was basically phrenology for the rest of the body. 🤡

He came up with his ideal European proportions.

This was during the golden age of "race science," when otherwise intelligent European people wasted lots of time trying to use math and science to justify their unjustifiable evil.

Now I need you to understand something before we go further: Race isn't real. Racism is.

"Black" people have naturally higher BMI. I put Black in scare quotes, because the 1.5 billion Black people don't have higher BMI. Black people *from a tiny part of West Africa* have higher BMI.🙋🏿‍♂️

Just like white people from a tiny part (Iceland) have higher BMI.

Just like Asian people from a tiny part (Samoa).

Every "race" has a tiny population with slightly more height, denser bones, and more muscle.

"Black" people are not over-represented in the NFL. People with denser bones and more fast twitch muscle, are over-represented in the NFL. Those people can be from any race. Any. Race.

There are only 65K people in American Samoa, but 30 NFL players and 200 D1 football players. That is extreme over-representation. Samoan and Tongan DNA is mostly from Asia. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Yes, Polynesian DNA is mostly Asian. E.g. Indigenous Taiwanese from thousands of years ago, and Han Chinese from decades ago.

A few hundred Taiwanese people got on a canoe thousands of years ago, and some of them were jacked! And now we have linebackers. 🤷🏿‍♂️

But because of racism, we can't just say, "Some people from Africa are huge and fast, and some people from Asia are huge and fast, but maybe let's not generalize *checks notes* billions of people based on a few thousand people?"

@keikioaina

Kind of?

There are some holes in this theory / clarifications that anthropologists from New Zealand and Australia and Hawaii have pointed out. There is a confluence of effects.

(Important caveat: I am not an anthropologist, and I am definitely not a Polynesian anthropologist. "I have read more papers on this than most people!🤡" does not qualify me as an expert on this topic. The minute someone with a long name shows up with "Professor of anthropology and molecular biology, University of Auckland" replace the next few paragraphs with what they say, because I probably read their paper anyway🤷🏿‍♂️).

1. The adaptations are: outlier height, bone density, muscle mass, proportion of fast twitch muscle, and barrel chestedness. The genes for the higher bone density, higher muscle mass, and higher proportion of fast twitch fibers found today in Polynesians existed in the underlying Taiwanese population before ocean voyages.

2. The barrel chestedness adaptations occurred over tens of thousands of years, and are similar to adaptations seen around the world for populations that live in very cold environments. So before they even got to Taiwan, the Polynesian population was already fairly tall, had extremely high bone density, had a large proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers, but were not as barrel-chested. They then spent 10,000 or 20,000 years living in very cold conditions. Then they moved to Taiwan.

3. Then when they left Taiwan, there was a brief period of selection due to ocean voyages, but not enough time to significantly select for the underlying genes.

Which is why people that landed on the same Polynesian islands through similar ocean voyage canoe selection, but didn't have the same underlying genes, and weren't cold adapted, are not as big as Tongans, Samoans, Maori, or Hawaiians.