Famously "curvy" stars like Jennifer Lopez and Scarlett Johansson may have new reason to celebrate those curves: A new study suggests that curvy women score higher on intelligence tests and have more intelligent children than their thinner peers.
The study used data from a federally-collected database to compare women's waist-to-hip ratio with their scores on cognitive tests. Women whose waists were significantly smaller than their hips -- traditionally "curvy" women -- reported higher scores, as did their children.
University of Pittsburgh and University of California at Santa Barbara researchers William Lassek and Steven Gaulin were interested in the discrepancies between fat distribution in men and women, as well as men's apparent preference for women with a bit more meat on their bones.
"If you've ever seen Playboy, you know this preference," Gaulin said. "All we're asking is, why do women have more fat [than men], why is it distributed differently and why do men care?"
The key to intelligent children, Lassek said, may lie in deposits of omega-3 fatty acids in a woman's hips and thighs. Such fats are crucial in brain development.
More omega-3 fatty acids during pregnancy, the study indicates, result in better brain development and, thus, children who score higher on standardized cognitive tests.
This isn't to say, however, that J. Lo's pending offspring will definitively be trumping Nicole Richie's little junior in the classroom.
"The differences are much smaller when you look at the actual data," Penn State psychology professor Richard Carlson wrote in an e-mail. When the researchers factored out variables such as age, education and income, curvy women scored 1 to 1.5 percent higher on intelligence tests, he said.
"The effect is not huge, but the effect is statistically significant," Gaulin said. "Over the big sweep of human evolution, there was no education, there were no differences in family income. All of those other extraneous pressures would not have mattered when men's mating preferences were being shaped."
Reactions to the study have been mixed.
David Puts, a professor of anthropology at Penn State, said that while he found the findings interesting, "there's all these other possible connections" that could explain curvy women's higher scores on cognitive tests.
"I suppose I just want to see more research," he said.
Irina Aristarkhova, professor of women's studies, said the findings may be encouraging for women who feel pressured to be thin.
"Hopefully, some women who are starving themselves would read [the study] in a positive light," she said.
Skeptics, however, have gone as far as dismissing the study entirely.
"I am of the opinion that this is a joke," Peggy Howell, public relations director for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, wrote in an e-mail. The organization promotes the acceptance of all body types.
Still, the researchers remain enthusiastic about their findings.
"One thing that's in the back of my mind when I do this work -- a lot of the fashion magazines downplay curviness and make women feel bad for being curvy," Gaulin said. "All I wanted to do was to tell women that there's a reason for being curvy ... If they care about their children, they should love their hips."
