Israel has passed a law this week requiring publications to note when an image has been edited to make a model look thinner, and also bans the feature of underweight models in advertisements. However, it isn’t clear how this law will be enforced, because proving that a well photoshoped image has been edited is quite difficult and almost every image published will be edited some way or the other.
Supporters of this new law hope that it will encourage advertisers to use healthy models, while opposers say the BMI system used as a gauge of health is flawed. The scale terms anyone with a BMI of less than 18.5 as underweight, but takes into account only height and weight, ignoring varying proportions of muscle, bone and fat. Some people with a BMI of less than 18.5 can be termed as healthy, whereas those with a large proportion of muscle can be called overweight.
It will be soon in the near future how well this new law works.
