The way we look speaks volumes about our health because of the fact that form implies function.
Perhaps because the subject of appearance is so emotionally charged, physicians pretend that disfiguring birth defects and other developmental malformations are unavoidable.
If doctors and nutritionists were willing to explore the beauty–health connection, every child would have a better chance to grow up healthy.
A California surgeon created a formula for evaluating the beauty–health connection, based on the same principle of symmetry described by ancient Greeks.
Athletic bodies and movie-star faces tend to reflect this symmetry, which is, in turn, a reflection of their genetic wealth.
What exactly is beauty? Few people make sense when they talk about it. The subject is either too profound or too emotionally charged to describe objectively. Even talent agents who make their living in the beauty trade characterize it using imprecise euphemisms: a glow, a certain something. Press a publisher, a judge, a casting director, or a news reporter hard enough and you might get them to confess that good looks matter in their fields more than they’d like to admit. On the other hand, feminists like author Camile Paglia have suggested that beauty may all be a big put-on, and that without cover girls, movie stars, and other models saturating the media, we’d be immune to its effects.
Controversial and enigmatic as the subject of beauty may seem, in reality, beauty is simply another natural phenomenon that, like gravity or the speed of light, can be quantified, analyzed, and understood. Though poets and songwriters might object, significant benefits can be derived from deconstructing human beauty using the same tools we would bring to any other scientific question. In fact, beauty can tell us quite a lot about our genetic histories, our bodies, and our health.
EIGHT HISTORICAL STUDIES OF HUMAN ANATOMY AND ADHERENCE TO PHI PROPORTIONS
Were all these men obsessed with physical beauty? We could say so. But realize that until very recently the concept of beauty, structural integrity, movement, and grace were considered aspects of the same phenomenon. More accurate might be to say they were obsessed with geometric proportion.
This connection is anything but abstract. In ancient times, athletes were considered exemplary demonstrations of the relationship between beauty, strength, and health. Many art historians agree that the Greco-Roman depiction of the idealized male figure is an argument in stone that there is a connection between form and function, symmetry and grace, and that these conjoined qualities are worthy of celebration.82, 83, 84
I bear witness to the reality of the beauty-health connection every day in my clinic. And whether they realize it or not, so does every primary care doctor in America: the number-one reason for an office visit is “arthropathies [joint pain] and related disorders”85 very often attributable to a musculoskeletal imbalance arising from a skeletal asymmetry.86 The entire field of chiropractic is based on evaluating skeletal alignments—another way of talking about symmetry and balance. Hang around backstage at any professional sporting event where trainers are trying to maintain an athlete’s ability to function and you hear words like symmetry, balance, and stability floated around as these professionals discuss how one small asymmetry in physiology or motion has the potential to work its way up the “kinetic chain” leading to secondary imbalances that can disable a player for weeks or months.
Outside the field of medicine, many life-science professionals apply their ability to judge physical attractiveness without hesitation. When a farmer or a racehorse breeder or a rare orchid grower sees obvious disruptions in healthy growth, they naturally consider the nutritional context in which the specimen was raised. If a prize-winning mare gives birth to a foal with abnormally bowed legs, the veterinarian recognizes that something went wrong and, often, asks the logical question, What was the mother eating? But physicians rarely do that, even when life-threatening problems show up right at birth. And we continue to neglect the nutrition-development equation when our patients develop scoliosis, joint malformations, aneurysms, autism, schizophrenia, and so on later in life. If doctors and nutritionists were as willing as other professionals to use their basic senses, every child would have a better chance to grow up healthy.
Our desire for beauty is no simple matter of vanity. The way we look speaks volumes about our health because of the fact that form implies function. Less attractive facial forms are less functional. Children with suboptimal skull structure may need glasses, braces, or oral surgery, whereas children with more ideal architecture won’t. 87 This is because suboptimal architecture impairs development of normal geometry, leading to imperfectly formed facial features, be it the eyes or ears or nose or jaw and throat. For example, narrow nasal passages irritate the mucosa, increasing the chances of rhinitis and allergies.88, 89 When the airway in the back of the throat is improperly formed, a child may suffer from sleep apnea, which starves the brain of the oxygen needed to develop normal intelligence.90, 91 One of the few instances in which doctors do use visual assessments to screen for health disorders is with a condition known loosely as minor anomalies, also known, much less formally, as the “funny looking kid.” It’s common enough that it even has an acronym, FLK. This diagnosis is one of the primary reasons for genetic testing. Children with growth anomalies are the group most often found to have genetic diseases and internal organ malformations, and they frequently develop learning disorders, socialization disorders, and cancer.92 And let’s not pretend a person’s physical development has no social consequences. Less attractive people rate themselves as less popular,93 less happy,94 and less healthy.95 They are more depressed more often,96 spend more time in jail, 97 and as adults, they earn less98 than their more attractive peers.
My personal story feeds right into this discussion. In high school, I competed in cross-country and track at an international level and ultimately earned a four-year college athletic scholarship and an invitation to the Olympic trials for the 1500-meter race. While I suffered more than my fair share of injuries, I always found a way—an orthotic insert or an extra couple of stretching exercises—to keep myself in the competition and remain undefeated. But in college, my body started falling apart faster than it had in high school. The rehab programs and assistive orthotics I’d relied upon could no longer keep me competitive. I soon fell behind the pack. Not long after, I was sidelined. Then redshirted: no more running for an entire season.
If you’ve ever had the privilege of being involved with competitive sports, you know what happens once you take off that uniform and you’re no longer part of the team: you get really introspective. You start asking questions. Why couldn’t I have gone further when others did? What’s different about me? Did I not bring it in terms of effort or is there something about me physically that just plain doesn’t measure up?
It’s that last question that haunted me as I began to notice the little differences between my body and the bodies of the girls who went on to national competition. Their waists were longer. Their hips wider and more flexible. They were lithe and supple while my short, blocky waist sat atop the same narrow hips I had when I was twelve, stubbornly refusing to develop.
As a twenty-year-old senior at Rutgers College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I developed a suspicion, the awakening of perception, that allowed me to begin to see a connection between form, function, and health that I had never fully appreciated before. At that same time, a thousand miles away on the west bank of the widest section of the Mississippi, the man who I would meet five years later and ultimately marry was dealing with his own recurring health issues and asking the very same questions about his own body and how good looks and physical ability and health might all be connected. For both of us, these questions became obsessions that would ultimately collide at the moment we decided to create a simple pamphlet for my patients who wanted a short guide to health and nutrition. A document that ultimately became this book.
We also were equally curious about the inverse circumstance: What happens when everything goes right? In both of our high schools, when Rod Stewart sang, “Some guys have all the luck …” we knew who he was talking about: the homecoming king. You may have noticed this in your high school, too. Was he popular? Athletic? Pretty smart? And what about the prom queen? In my high school, she was also the valedictorian and MVP on the soccer team. But why should this be so? What is it about beauty that makes something not only look better but also function better? And what makes us want it so badly?
After years of subsequent research, I discovered that the bulk of evidence suggests that the same conditions that allow our DNA to create health also allow our DNA to grow beautiful people. I call this phenomenon the package deal effect because beauty and health are just that—a package deal. The more you have of one, the more you probably have of the other.
And the more you have of each of these qualities, the more other people will be attracted to you. It all boils down to science: when you’re attracted to someone else, or when you are decidedly not attracted to another person, you are engaged in a sophisticated scientific enquiry. There’s nothing shallow about it; it’s as deep as it gets. Like the laws of engineering, chemistry, and physics, the laws of physical attraction emerge from the fabric of the universe and can best be understood using the language of mathematics.
THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED THE PERFECT FACE
The desire for beauty is so great that some of us take matters into our own hands—or rather, into the hands of a professional—to get a larger helping of its sweet rewards. In 2005 more than 11 million cosmetic procedures were performed in the United States alone. Most procedures involve moving fat, skin, and muscle around the face and body, but an extreme makeover can require breaking and resetting bone. As doctors permanently rearrange our looks, what standards, do you suppose, guide their decisions? The answer is none—that is, none aside from their own personal aesthetics and experience. Thankfully, their skills usually leave the patient looking better rather than worse. But their training does not provide them with instructions for rebuilding faces according to any universal standard of ideal facial architecture.
Why not? Simply put, it’s complicated. Each person’s face has a distinct 3-D geometry that our brains can interpret. We don’t know how exactly, and most of us don’t need to worry about it. But if plastic surgeons want to build better faces reliably, and if they want to know whether or not they will be repositioning a jaw, a tooth, or an eyebrow in an attractive location that also allows for normal function, they should have at their disposal a blueprint for designing attractive and functional facial geometry. Such was the thinking of a bright, young maxillofacial surgeon at UCLA named Dr. Stephen Marquardt.
This was no ordinary plastic surgeon. This was a man on call for UCLA ER and in charge of reconstructing people’s faces after serious vehicular accidents and penetrating trauma. One evening in the late 1970s, Dr. Marquardt couldn’t sleep. In two days time he would commence an operation on a woman who’d been in a terrible car accident. It was his job to reconstruct her badly damaged lower face. But one question nagged him all night: How can I be sure she’ll be happy with the results? In those days there were relatively few plastic or reconstructive surgeons, even in Los Angeles, and patients would receive their particular surgeon’s trademark work—say, Audrey Hepburn’s nose—with results so consistent that other surgeons could tell who the patient had seen. Dr. Marquardt realized Hepburn’s petite nose, as undeniably cute as it was, might not be the right nose for just anyone. How could a doctor know which nose, or chin, or jaw line is best proportioned for the face of the person on the operating table? Marquardt wondered why there weren’t some rules or standards to follow. Would he always have to guess, fingers crossed, or might there be a more dependable approach?
In a search for answers, Dr. Marquardt went to a museum and spent the day examining great works of art. At the end of the day he had a stack of sketches, but no definitive set of rules. He wanted to know what, if any, principle guided the creation of all great works of art. Over the next several months he studied rules of beauty in architecture, art, music, and more. Still, no consistent theme emerged.
Finally, he recognized that he kept running across formulas, like the triangle on the color wheel, and the “rule of threes” as applied in painting, photography, writing, and other art forms. He’d been studying individual subjects to find a common link, and that link was mathematics. At the core of the mathematical principles of beauty lay a set of numbers named after the Italian who first discovered it in the eleventh century—the Fibonacci Sequence.
BEAUTY’S SECRET CODE: PHI
You may remember the Fibonacci sequence from The DaVinci Code, in which the cryptologist heroine discovers a series of numbers her grandfather wrote on the floor with invisible ink at the site of his murder: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. The sequence builds by summing the last two numbers on the end, growing forever. Had the dead man lived to write the next number, he would have written 34—the sum of 13 and 21. If one were looking for a universal code of proportionate growth, this sequence of numbers would be the Holy Grail.
THE GOLDEN RECTANGLE
With length phi+1 and height phi, the Golden Rectangle is divided in such a way as to create a square and a smaller rectangle that retains the same proportions as the original. Because of the amazing symmetry of phi, this proportion can be repeated over and over ad infinitum. Drawing a radius equal to the length of the side of the square across each square generated a golden spiral.
As you extend the sequence out to infinity, the ratio of the last two terms converges on an irrational number, approximately 1.618033988. This is the golden ratio, used by the Greeks and Egyptians to design perfectly balanced works of structural art that mystify architects even today. The golden ratio is symbolized by the Greek letter phi: Ö (pronounced fie, rhymes with pie).
The Egyptians and Greeks worshipped phi as a fountainhead of eternal beauty, calling it the divine ratio. The Parthenon and other great works of ancient architecture that still stand today do so in part because they were designed around this mathematic principle of ideal proportion, and architects to this day still study them with wonder. The philosopher Socrates saw geometry, in which phi plays a central role in relating various forms, not only as a guiding constant of the natural world but also as a potential source of life itself. Leonardo DaVinci was obsessed with geometric relationships and the structure of the human form; his famous Vitruvian Man sketch of a man superimposed on a circle and a square illustrates his own quest for a code of nature that generates living forms.
In his pursuit of the perfect face, Dr. Marquardt discovered that the golden ratio is uniquely capable of generating a special kind of symmetry called dynamic symmetry. According to the theory of perception, there are two ways to create harmonic balance within an object or space. One is to divide it into equal parts, creating the symmetry of balance. Biradial symmetry is an example of this kind of symmetry. (See illustrations on pages 61 and 62). The other is a division based on the golden section, creating the perfect form of asymmetry—perfect because the ratio of the lesser part to the greater part is the same as the ratio of the greater part to the whole. (See illustration below.) This is dynamic symmetry. Interestingly, dynamic symmetry characterizes the growth of living matter, while the symmetry of balance characterizes the growth of crystals.
The literature on human beauty is full of references to biradial symmetry, suggesting that if one side perfectly mirrors the other, you’ve got a beautiful face. But that’s a misconception, and here’s why: although dynamic symmetry often leads to biradial symmetry, biradial symmetry does not guarantee, or even imply, dynamic symmetry. Put another way, biradial symmetry is a necessary, though not sufficient, characteristic of an attractive human face. As Marquardt explains it: “You can draw Alfred E. Neuman with perfect biradial symmetry but he’s not going to turn into Paul Newman.” Living, growing beings are dynamic, and that’s exactly the kind of symmetry that makes them beautiful.
BEAUTY EMERGES FROM MATH
Every line of Marquardt’s Mask is geometrically plotted according to the dynamic symmetry of phi. When epigenetic conditions provide for optimal growth, facial features “crystalize” in a pattern that conforms to the mask. This is the female mask. According to Marquardt, the male mask is a variation on the female.
Dr. Marquardt focused on phi as the essential clue. The divine ratio had to be buried somewhere in the proportions of the perfect human face.
If Hollywood were to set the action to film, they would show a montage of Dr. Marquardt at his desk holding his compass and protractor to a series of cover girls’ faces, then a heap of dulled pencils in the foreground as he scratches out another formula involving square roots and algebraic variables. Until finally the moment of epiphany. Cut to Marquardt raising his cipher to the camera: a clear sheet of acetate on which his “Primary Golden Decagon Matrix” is printed in bold, black lines, the angulated mask of a perfect human face.
Marquardt’s Mask is a matrix of points, lines, and angles delineating the geometric framework and borders of what Marquardt calls the archetypal face, a plotted graph of the visual ideal our collective unconscious yearns for. Nested within the matrix are forty-two secondary Golden Decagon Matrices, each the same shape as the larger matrix, but smaller by various multiples of phi. These lock on to the primary matrix by at least two vertices.99 The mask defines the ideal three-dimensional arrangement of every facial feature, from the size of the eyes and their distance from one another to the width of the nose, to the fullness of the upper and lower lip, and so on.
BLUEPRINT FOR BEAUTY
Marquardt’s Mask fits neatly over beautiful facial architecture no matter what race.
PRICE MEETS MARQUARDT
A very high percentage of Maasai and other people Price photographed displayed similar bone structure to this attractive young lady. (Looking into the sun, she is squinting a little bit.)
In John Cleese’s BBC series The Human Face, featuring Marquardt and based largely on his research, the mask transparency is placed atop separate photos of Marilyn Monroe, Halle Berry, and Elizabeth Taylor.100 Like a glass slipper sliding over Cinderella’s foot, the mask fits each face perfectly, revealing the fact that, though each woman could be distinguished through skin tone and hair color, these icons of mega-stardom are all kin of consummate proportion who, by no coincidence, entered the world wearing the same archetypical mask. So much for beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Beautiful people exist not because of luck, but because all DNA is naturally driven to create dynamically symmetric geometry as it’s generating tissue growth.
Marquardt’s work reveals the specific facial geometry that healthy human DNA creates. His work extends the thinking of a long line of architects and mathematicians who identified phi proportions in the human body: Vitruvius in the first century B.C. (the architect who gave DaVinci the idea for his famous Vitruvian Man); Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio Martini in the fifteenth century; Luca Pacioli and Sebastiano Serlio in the sixteenth; Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Swiss architect Le Corbusier, in the twentieth. Adolf Zeising could have been speaking for all of them when he pontificated, in 1854, that within the golden ratio “is contained the fundamental principle of all formation striving to beauty and totality in the realm of nature and in the field of the pictorial arts, and that from the very beginning was the highest aim and ideal of all figurations and formal relations, whether cosmic or individualizing, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical, which had found its most perfect realization however only in the human figure.”101
Like the Egyptian scientists thousands of years ago who found mathematical order extended throughout their landscape and out into the stars, I believe the same mathematic principles that give order to the universe also govern the growth of every part of every living thing. When that growth proceeds optimally, beautiful and functional biologic structures are the inevitable result. This is not a new idea; it echoes the writings of ancient philosophers from Plato to Pythagoras. What we can now understand that could not have been known in ancient times, however, is precisely how the human brain so easily decides so much math, instantaneously recognizing complex geometric patterns and translating them into an emotion—desire, awe, tranquility, fear.
WHY WE LIKE BEAUTIFUL THINGS: NATURE’S GEOMETRIC LOGIC
Take a walk through a garden, in the woods, or on a beach, and you’ll see all kinds of pretty things. If you look a bit closer, you’ll notice patterns—curves, whorls, spirals, even repeating numbers. What’s behind this? A new discipline, called biomathematics, is all about answering that question. Biomathematicians are confirming that phi and the Fibonacci Sequence are encoded not just in the human face, but in living matter everywhere.
The shape of a pinecone, the segments of insect bodies, the spiral of the nautilus shell, the bones of your fingers, and the relative sizes of your teeth—everything that grows owes its form to the geometry of phi. When a plant shoot puts out a new leaf, it does so in such a way that lower leaves are least obscured, and can still receive sunlight. This is a benefit of a phenomenon called phyllotaxis, which describes the spiraling growth of stems, petals, roots, and other plant organs in 90 percent of plants throughout the world.102 The angle of phyllotaxis is 137.5 degrees, or 1/phi2 x 360 degrees. We can see the same pattern of branching, twisting—so-called dendritic growth—when we look at nerve cells in the brain. All these instances of patterned growth are directed not by DNA but by the rules of math and physics which act on living tissue automatically to create pattern. During the course of cellular and tissue growth there comes a point where the flow of genetic information drops away and, like a lunar module floating through space, the organism’s growth is now on autopilot. As author, journalist, and TV producer Dr. Simon Singh explains:
Physics and mathematics are capable of producing intricate patterns in non-organic constructions (for example, snowflakes and sand dunes). They can offer a range of patterns which will emerge spontaneously, given the correct starting conditions. The theory which is currently gaining support says that life operates by using DNA to create the right starting conditions, and thereafter physics and maths do all the rest.103
Biomathematics offers us a fundamentally new perspective of the universe and the living world. It is allowing us to recognize that recurring patterns seen throughout our living landscape are more than just coincidences. They seem to reflect the elemental structure and order of the universe itself.104, 105
This organizing force, which helps sculpt a beautiful face, also functions during development of your brain. Within the jelly-like matrix inside our skulls, neurons in the human brain form bifurcating tendrils, called dendrites (meaning branches). We call them dendrites because the earliest scientists who peered at neurons under a microscope were reminded of stately, graceful trees. For us to think and learn, these trees must be properly proportioned. This enchanted forest is the hidden landscape where beautiful minds are born.
Why would phyllotactic patterns of growth form inside the dark vaults of our skulls? The most obvious answer is, Because every healthy part of every living thing follows the same basic formula for growth in order to function. Just as the golden rectangle delineates phyllotactic growth and helps plants capture more sunlight, the same dynamic symmetry may allow our brains to pack in as many nerve connections per cubic inch as possible, making best use of the limited real estate between our ears. More complex than any computer and more efficient, the network in your brain works because each brain cell is connected to thousands of others. Those connections enable you to recognize faces, flowers, food, and other familiar objects. How? With pattern.
Cognition is what mathematicians would call an emergent property. Emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Your thoughts and emotions are, likewise, not based on any individual brain cell’s contents, but on the resonance frequencies that arise when millions of interconnected neurons are stimulated.106, 107 Phi may help our brains work better by using its nimble mathematic flexibility to allow resonance to occur more often. When our nerves are structured so as to contain the maximum internal symmetry, not only can we sustain more complex perceptions, we can better comprehend the relationships between perceptions, memories, thoughts, and other cognitive phenomena. In other words, every specialized sub-portion of our entire brain can function as an interconnected unit, and—poof!—consciousness emerges.
The pleasure we derive from looking at attractive people may offer us more insight into how the brain works. If beautiful faces share the same fundamental proportionality as the connections in our brains—phi—then they may trigger a more ordered series of recognizable resonances than faces with less symmetry, which may enable us to recognize the image as a distinctly human face that much faster. The biology of our brains may be such that our brains experience pleasure on having solved the puzzle of sorting out just what it is we’re looking at. Every time the brain is presented with an image or sound it is, in essence, being posed a kind of mathematic riddle. The more pleasing the image or harmonious the sound, the fewer the barriers standing between the beholder and the pleasure of the epiphany of a solution. The Fibonacci Sequence may facilitate this process, enabling us to solve these visual or acoustic riddles faster by serving as a template that helps order our minds and orchestrate our thoughts. Not only, then, does phi offer us beauty, it also seems to arrange our nerves in ways that facilitate intelligence.
Instinctive Attraction: The Myth of the Eye of the Beholder
The fact that the architecture of our neural tissue so closely mirrors that of dynamically symmetric, and therefore attractive, objects in the outer world helps to explain how our brains work. It also explains why our brains would prefer images of this same symmetry over others: their familiar geometry resonates instantaneously with our own, making beautiful objects easier to perceive. Suggesting that beauty recognition seems hardwired into our brains, Nancy Etcoff, author of Survival of the Prettiest, tells us that “when babies fix their stare at the same faces adults describe as highly attractive, their actions wordlessly argue against the belief that culture must teach us to recognize human beauty.”108
Consider the complications that would arise if a cheetah sizing up a herd had to be trained to recognize the absence of health, to meticulously weigh the implications of a halting gait or an uneven coat, signs of injury and disease. Without a killer instinct, or an instinctive guide to health, predators would go hungry, social animals would put themselves in contact with disease, and good genes would be diluted with compromised DNA.
This idea, that we humans instinctively recognize the form-function relationship and use the presence or absence of dynamic symmetry to gauge health, is supported by studies in which people were shown a series of male and female faces, each with varying levels of symmetry, and asked to make judgments about who was healthiest. What emerged was an undeniable positive correlation between the possession of dynamic symmetry and the perception of health.109 So whether we’re a cheetah, a baby, or a doctor, as far as our brains are concerned, dynamic symmetry—and attractiveness—equals health.
WHY ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE ENTRANCE US
We presume we are entranced by beautiful faces because we are sexually attracted, but it may be that we are attracted to their patterns. When animal researchers show rats checkerboard patterns, the resulting brain waves demonstrate rhythmic spikes (upper right panel), which are said to reflect a state of “attentive immobility.” While staring at the checkered image, blood flow to the pleasure center of the brain is increased, suggesting the rat enjoys looking at the pattern. Researchers believe this kind of brain activity allows for the “optimization of sensory integration within the corticothalmic neural pathways,” which helps the rat “learn” the pattern.
Of course, the ultimate purpose of this subconscious appreciation of the form-function relationship is the perpetuation of our DNA through the act of reproduction. And when it comes to the mating game, our responses to attractive members of the appropriate sex will typically percolate from their origins deep in our psyche to reach the surface, where they can become all-consuming.
WHY ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE ENTRANCE US
We are attracted to pattern at birth. Researchers studying infants find that babies gaze at more symmetrical faces longer and learn to recognize them faster, supporting the idea that pattern, both within the structure of our brains and within the objects our senses explore, enables us to make sense of the world. At puberty our brains begin to associate certain patterns with sexual promise, enabling us, instinctively, to select the most fit mates.
The Perfect Mate: In Search of Sexual Dimorphism
When looking for that perfect man or woman, research shows that facial features deviating from Marquardt’s geometric blueprint even slightly make a surprisingly large impression—or lack of impression.110 A set of lips that fall just a millimeter or two short of luscious fullness, or eyes just a fraction of an inch too close together, downgrade a girl from pretty to plain. Take a strong brow and chin and pull them both back a tiny bit, and you change a handsome, dominating man—the kind you might envision as CEO of a company, or captain of the ship in an adventure movie—into a docile-looking office drone. Every curve of our features is sculpted under the influence of nature’s tendency toward perfection. Our minds, too, are tuned by the ratio of phi, and so we desire dynamic symmetry, and pursue it with great tenacity. The extreme attraction we have toward sex objects exists because, during puberty, our gray matter is tuned to lust after a well-defined set of sex-specific variations on Marquardt’s Mask (see illustration). These variations on the theme of human attractiveness are collectively called sexual dimorphism. While sex-differences in our facial and skeletal development exist in childhood, they become much more pronounced at sexual maturity. The package-deal effect predicts that those bodies that develop the full gamut of sex-specific features are the healthiest, and research correlating female body type with health bears this out.
Female Body Type and Health
Beauty researchers have divided female body types into four categories. In order of declining frequency they are: banana, apple, pear, and hourglass.111 Several studies performed in 2005 showed that apple-shaped women (with short waists and narrow hips) had almost double the mortality rates of women with more generous curves.112, 113 Why would that be?
Voluptuousness is an indication of healthy female sexual dimorphism, while a lack of voluptuousness indicates a problem. Normally, the hips and bust develop during puberty as a result of a healthy surge in sex hormones. These developments involve expansion of the pelvic bones along with the deposition of fat and glandular tissue within the breasts. But women whose genetics are such that their spines are abnormally short or their hormonal surge less pronounced—or whose diet is such that it interferes with the body’s response to hormones—end up with boxier figures. If they’re thin, they’ll end up as bananas. If they put on weight, it gets distributed in a more masculine pattern—in the belly, on the neck, and around the upper arms—and they’ll become apples. Today, after three generations of trans fat consumption (which interferes with hormone expression; see Chapter 7), and with daily infusions of sugar (which interferes with hormone receptivity; see Chapter 9), hourglass figures have become something of a rarity. According to a 2005 study commissioned by Alva products, a manufacturer of designers’ mannequins, less than 10 percent of women today develop the voluptuous curves universally recognized as the defining features of a healthy and attractive female figure.114
FEMALE BODY TYPES
The hourglass represents normal female sexual development, while the banana develops when sex-hormone receptivity is blunted. While the apple and pear can be found among women with normal body weights, the apple most commonly develops when women with banana-shaped bodies put on weight, and the pear when women with hourglass-shaped bodies put on weight.
In a world of apples, pears, and bananas, writer Nancy Etcoff has suggested that the most beautiful among us are “genetic freaks.”115 It’s not an insult: she is merely referencing the statistical improbability of someone growing up to look like, to use her example, Cindy Crawford. But the suggestion seems to capture Etcoff’s general thesis accurately: when a stunningly beautiful person is born, it’s largely the result of (genetic) chance. These select few, the thinking goes, played the genetic lottery and won big. But I couldn’t disagree more. Why would biology program us to be hot for “genetic freaks”? It seems to me far more probable that we are attracted to beautiful bodies because they advertise superlative health. In keeping with this idea, researchers studying the effect of these four female body types on life span find that women with the most attractive of the four body types, the hourglass, not only live the longest, they also live better. Statistics consistently show that having a longer, slimmer waist and more womanly hips correlates with reduced diagnoses of infertility,116 osteoporosis,117 cancer,118 cognitive problems,119 abdominal aneurysms,120 diabetes and its complications,121 and more.
Why Aren’t All Bodies Perfect?
So far I’ve shown you a good deal of evidence that beauty is not incidental, not an accident of fate. It is the default position, the inevitable product of natural, unimpeded growth whose progress conforms to rules of mathematic proportion. Just as the laws of physics dictate that six-sided crystals inevitably result when clouds of water vapor form in freezing air, generations of optimal nutrition prime human chromosomal material for optimal growth. If optimal nutrition continues throughout childhood development, the laws of biology dictate the final result: a beautiful, healthy person. But if beauty emerges naturally from well-ordered growth, then why aren’t all of us beautiful?
In October 2006, at a meeting in his Huntington Beach, California, home, I asked Dr. Marquardt his opinion. His answer was, “We are.” When I said I was surprised to hear this from a person who makes his living correcting facial anomalies, he elaborated: “If you put the mask over the population, you’ll see that many people are not that far off from a perfect fit, though we wouldn’t regard them as highly attractive.” The variability we do have, he believes, stems from the fact that “we’ve evolved past the point of efficiency.” In other words, societal safety nets allow people who aren’t perfectly healthy or functional to reproduce, whereas, in the past, they would simply have died off.
Marquardt’s pragmatic explanation sheds some light on the origins of our current, historically unprecedented level of attractiveness variability. If we examine human history and focus only on access to nutrients, we would find that with civilization and sedentism (not migrating) came food shortages and disease. But sedentism was also less physically demanding than the wandering, hunter- or herder-gatherer lifestyle, and so it acted as a kind of safety net. Living in settled, relatively crowded cities began to chip away at our genetic programming, leading to the rise of disease while simultaneously enabling people with damaged genes, who might otherwise have died, to survive and give birth to less healthy children with less dynamic symmetry. Bit by bit, the genetic wealth created by thousands of years of successful survival in the wild was squandered as poverty or plague denied genes the nutrients they needed. During each period of nutritional deprivation valuable epigenetic programming was lost.
As time has passed, we have required more and more safety nets and invented correctives like glasses, braces, and thousands of medications. Some would argue this physiologic fall from grace has not yet proved to be maladaptive for people living in modern industrialized societies, as we are still successfully reproducing. But that might be changing. Like many doctors in this country, I’m seeing more young couples frustrated by infertility. How widespread this problem will become remains to be seen.
I’m certainly not suggesting that only supermodels should have babies. And since I have argued that the genes of all people of every race and every walk of life carry the potential of extraordinary beauty and health, the implications of this chapter run about as far from the specter of eugenics as you can get. What I am saying is that—in the same way that I tell women trying to get pregnant to stop smoking and drinking, take their folic acid, and avoid medications known to cause birth defects—there are nutritional choices you can make to help ensure that your baby will be born healthy and beautiful if that is what you desire. Of course, parents can choose to smoke and drink and ignore their doctor’s advice. But I think every one of us deserves the best, latest, most complete information with which to make choices.
In the previous chapters, I’ve argued that the human genome’s adaptability, its intelligence, is so vast that we are only now beginning to unravel its mysteries. What we do know is that its ability to create the perfect human body and maintain health is, as with any master craftsman, limited by the materials it has to work with. In this chapter we learned how powerfully anatomy shapes our destiny. In the last chapter we learned how our ancestors’ focus on nutrition paid off in healthy babies and long-lived adults who were vital until the very end.
AN AVERAGE FACE
Marquardt tweaked the formula to get the mask to fit my face. If facial growth is disrupted, horizontal (X) and vertical (Y) planes grow disproportionately and perfect dynamic symmetry is lost. According to Marquardt, narrow faces are common, suggesting that when nutritional conditions are suboptimal, the coordination of growth planes is uncoupled, and the X plane shrinks. But if conditions are bad enough, the growth coordination within a plane begins to fall apart. That’s why, even with the mask adjustment, my jaw is still too narrow to fit.
So what happens when we forsake those traditions?
Not surprisingly, having been fabricated without all the normal ingredients, people today are developing “old age” diseases in early or midlife as well as other health problems previous generations never even heard of. (Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine from 1990 doesn’t even list attention deficit disorder or fibromyalgia in the index, and I didn’t hear much about either in medical school. Now, both are common.) If the genetic intelligence needs more nutrients than it’s currently getting, and if Price was right, and perfect faces grow where good nutrition flows, you’d expect to see facial form progressively diverging from Dr. Marquardt’s definition of the ideal. I think that’s exactly what’s happening. In the next chapter, you’ll read evidence that not only does facial degeneration predictably develop from poor nutrition, the effects are so immediate that you can see it happening within the space of a single generation.