For a Sound Body, A Sound Mind

Columbia research indicates there’s a new reason to love your body.

The findings of a study led by Professor Peter Muennig of Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health implicate the influence of one’s personal body image on one’s physical and mental health. The research, which was completed last March, suggests some truth to the platitude: you are only as healthy as you feel.

Using body weight as the experiment’s constant, Muennig and his fellow researchers took a random sample size of adults in the U.S., obtained their body mass indices, and then asked them a series of questions. Participants were asked whether or not they desired to lose weight, and then how many days out of the past month they had felt physically or mentally unhealthy.

According to the study’s results published in the American Journal of Public Health, “despite their higher mean age, persons who were happy with their weight experienced fewer physically unhealthy days ... and mentally unhealthy days ... compared with persons unhappy with their weight.” On one level, the study shows that “seeing yourself as overweight is a potential health threat,” Muennig explained.

These results also lend to speculation on the media’s impact on self-perception. Next, Muennig would like to explore whether negativity towards one’s body and obsession over weight are recent phenomena. “In the nineteenth century, overweight bodies were considered attractive, and that has slowly changed over time,” Muennig said. He expressed his hope to continue research that will provide evidence for such claims, and to “address the commercialization of the human body.”

“I think one of the take-home messages from this field as a whole is that one really has to question the messages that we are getting about our bodies from the general media,” Muennig said. “Regardless if these findings are actually valid, there is a huge profit and industry associated with making people feel bad about their bodies.”

The pressure that mainstream media places on its targeted audience is a widely acknowledged reality among scholars and non-academics alike. Students on campus were quick to offer their views on the results of the study.

“You watch any reality TV show, the people are all super skinny,” Alexander Lew, CC ’12, said. “I can see how that morphs a young kid’s mind.”

Others, however, expressed greater skepticism.

“I think that I’m fatter than I actually am, and I hardly ever get sick,” Nicole Stanziola Zebede, CC ’12, said. “I think there are so many other factors that go into getting sick—it could be the weather, your immune system, or just not taking care of yourself. I don’t think people can get sick from just feeling fat.”

Although Muennig’s results have led to speculation on the relationship of body image to physical health, he would like to obtain more confirmatory data before asserting any conclusions. His next step will be to take more accurate physiological measures—such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels—in future follow-up studies, as opposed to just asking how many unhealthy days a participant has experienced in a month.