Concept of healthy body image in Spanish women

Introduction: For the prevention and treatment of eating disorders and obesity, the population should have an ade-quate perception of a healthy body image, and that may be influenced by nutritional status.Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the per-ception of healthy body image among Spanish women ac-cording to their nutritional status diagnosed by body mass index (BMI).Material and Methods: This work was carried out on 7,008 Spanish women, between 18 and 75 years old. To di-agnose the nutritional condition, weight and height were measured to calculate the BMI and categorize according to the Worl Health Organization (WHO) cut-off points. In addi-tion, each participant completed a silhouette questionnaire in which she/he indicated that considered to be the health-iest. Mean and Standar deviation were calculated to de-scribe the profile of anthropometric parameters and ANOVA was carried out to compare variation with age. A Chi-Square test was used to analyze the possible association between the nutritional category of BMI and the nutritional category considered "healthy" based on the silhouette identified in the test. The relationship between the ideal of a healthy fig-ure and the autonomous community of residence was also analyzed. Statistical analysis was performed with the IBM SPSS.21.0 program.Results: The results showed a significant association be-tween nutritional status and healthy body image perceived. The identification percentage of a silhouette representative of "normal weight" as a healthy body image ranged from 94% (in normal weight women), 92% (in overweight women), dropping to 88% (in obese class 1) and 83% (in obese class 2 and 3). No woman chose a silhouette corre-sponding to an obese BMI as a reference for a healthy im-age. As for the silhouette identifying overweight, it was cho-sen as healthy in a variable proportion between 2% (Madrid) and 15% (Balearic Islands).Conclusions: There is a significant relationship between nutritional status and body image considered healthy. The higher the BMI of women, the greater the tendency to choose a representative image of overweight as the ideal of health.