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Women may be loving their curves more now than they ever have before, but apparently some men don't quite feel the same.

That's according to a study (first published in PeerJ in 2015) which focused on different female body shape preferences, conducted by Professor John Speakman.

Speakman's team gave men from 10 countries across the world a set of cards featuring the varying body shapes of women, and told to rank them in order of attractiveness.

The most popular card depicted a female body with a BMI of 19, which is borderline underweight and typically associated with youth. The study also found that the popularity of female body shapes decreased as the BMI increased.

Apparently there's an evolutionary reason for this preference, as younger people are seen as fitter and therefore having a better ability to reproduce.

"Fitness in evolutionary terms comprises two things: survival and the ability to reproduce," Speakman explains. "What we wanted to investigate was the idea that when we look at someone and think they are physically attractive, are we actually making that assessment based on a hard-wired evolutionary understanding of their potential for future survival and reproductive ability?"

One of the study's authors, Dr Lobke Vaanholt, added: "Although most people will not be surprised that extreme thinness was perceived as the most attractive body type, since this prevails so heavily in media, culture and fashion, the important advance is that now we have an evolutionary understanding of why this is the case."

H/T PSYBLOG

Via: Red

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