Using relative distributions to investigate the body mass index in England and Canada

In this paper we use relative distributions to examine changes in the distribution of the body mass index (BMI) in England and Canada during the period 1994/5-2000/1. The use of relative distributions allows us to describe changes in the whole distribution of the BMI in a non-parametric fashion. While statistics analogous to the Gini index can be constructed based on the relative distribution, important characteristics of changes in the …