Anti-obesity messages are everywhere – in news, in entertainment, and
in public health campaigns. We are constantly being told that fat is
bad for us, and that in order to be healthy we need to lose weight. But
these messages don’t necessarily improve our health, and they certainly
don’t seem to result in weight loss. Instead, popular ideas about
fatness and health often reinforce social inequalities across class,
race, gender, and ability.
Fat is understood as fundamentally unhealthy. Fat bodies are thought of as “diseased”, and as the result of “unhealthy” habits. There’s plenty of research that challenges these ideas.
But the point of this article is not to engage in the frankly tiresome debates about weather fat people can be healthy (they can). Nor do I want to argue about whether being fat is correlated with an increased risk of certain health issues (it is, but as anyone with a high-school level understanding of statistics can tell you, correlation does not equal causation, and risk is no guarantee of outcome – otherwise we’d all be at the casino getting rich).
Read more: http://theconversation.edu.au/how-anti-obesity-campaigns-reinforce-stigma-8427
Fat is understood as fundamentally unhealthy. Fat bodies are thought of as “diseased”, and as the result of “unhealthy” habits. There’s plenty of research that challenges these ideas.
But the point of this article is not to engage in the frankly tiresome debates about weather fat people can be healthy (they can). Nor do I want to argue about whether being fat is correlated with an increased risk of certain health issues (it is, but as anyone with a high-school level understanding of statistics can tell you, correlation does not equal causation, and risk is no guarantee of outcome – otherwise we’d all be at the casino getting rich).
Read more: http://theconversation.edu.au/how-anti-obesity-campaigns-reinforce-stigma-8427
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