Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection by Rose E. Frisch, University of Chicago Press, £13/$20, ISBN 0226265455
“YOU can never be too rich or too thin” is a quip often attributed to the famously skinny Wallis Simpson. But Rose Frisch is not laughing. For years, she’s battled against both scientific prejudice and the fashion industry to make the case for female fat.
Frisch, now associate professor of population sciences emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues that women need a certain amount of body fat to maintain their fertility. Fall below that “critical fatness” threshold through dieting…
