Composition of the human body not in an essential biological role. The average adult human body contains approximately atoms and contains at least detectable traces of 60 chemical elements. About 29 of these elements are thought to play an active positive role in life and health in humans. The relative amounts of each element vary by individual, mainly due to differences in the proportion of fat, muscle and bone in their body. Persons with more fat will have a higher proportion of carbon and a lower proportion of most other elements (the proportion of hydrogen will be about the same). The numbers in the table
History of beliefs about the human body is important to understanding histories of coercion and control, sex and gender, and other important but culturally varied aspects of human experience. Another prominent voice in the field at the same time was Caroline Walker Bynum, whose 1988 "Holy Feast and Holy Fast" became a landmark study. Both Bynum and Porter noted that during the 1980s Western history of the body research drew on post-structuralist thought, such as Michel Foucault's ideas of biopolitics and biopower, which emphasised that state power is not abstract, but exercised through and over human bodies. But both expressed a concern that research was focusing too