Skinny models make young girls sick — UK docs

According to the BMA report, there are an estimated 60,000 people in Britain with eating disorders. Nine out of ten of these are female. Those most at risk of developing anorexia are in 13-18 age group, while bulimia happens slightly later in life, between the ages of 15 and 25.

While women are by far the largest sufferers, the number of male victims too has grown. This could be linked to the growth in male fashion and health magazines, it feels.

The BMA has called on the press to feature “more realistic body shapes” and to be more responsible about the pressures it puts on young women to be thin, too many of whom are at risk from “slimming” diseases.

Dr Vivienne Nathanson, BMA head of science, said: “There are a variety of human forms and we should not be going just for one type of body shape as that propagates the idea that only one type is successful and desirable.”

She further said: “The image of slim models in the media are a marked contrast to the body size and shape of most children and young women, who are becoming increasingly heavier.”

The report says that models and actresses in the 1990s commonly had body fat levels as low as 10 per cent — the average for a healthy woman is 22 per cent to 26 percent.

The BMA’s report follows growing concern in the medical profession and government about the incidence of eating disorders and the obsession with thin is beautiful. At its annual conference last year the BMA voted overwhelmingly to condemn the media’s obsession with super thin models.

Last month the government’s women’s minister Tessa Jowell held a meeting at Downing Street of modelling agencies and editors of teen magazines to discuss just this. The Downing Street meeting was prompted by a survey which showed that more than half the 12- to 15-year-old girls questioned in a study said their appearance was the biggest concern in their lives.

Jowell said that women were “over-preoccupied by feeling that they don’t meet the standards of thin models in young women’s magazines”, and that low self-confidence resulting from this meant they did not fulfil their potential. She said that the summit meeting her department had organised was an attempt to bring together influential people in the media and fashion worlds who could “begin to challenge some of the assumptions that the only way to be beautiful is to be thin”.

The most influential segment of the fashion business, however, is unwilling to challenge what helps it sell. Its reaction to the BMA report was characteristically defensive. Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue,

told the BBC: “All we are doing is showing images of women we regard as interesting or beautiful or fashionable. But we are not actually saying you have to be like this.”

Premier, the London-based model agency which represents supermodels Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer, said: “It is a supply and demand thing –advertisers, magazines and agencies supply the image that consumers want to see. Statistics have repeatedly shown that if you stick a beautiful skinny girl on the cover of a magazine you sell more copies.”