Making a Choice: Perpetuate or Challenge Obesity Stigma
This is an uncomfortable truth. Whether health professionals think about it or not in work that touches on obesity, they are making a choice: Are they perpetuating or challenging obesity stigma?
James Kite and colleagues make this point quite distinctly in Obesity Science & Practice. They write:
“Researchers have an essential choice to make: we can either perpetuate weight stigma or address it through reforms to research systems and the way that obesity‐related research is framed. When systemic processes and priorities overlook the impact of stigma, there is a risk of reinforcing weight‐centric models of practice and narratives of personal responsibility, with potential for far‐reaching consequences.”
Stigmatizing Language Perpetuates Stigma
Respected colleagues will sometimes be dismissive of attention to stigmatizing language in the context of medical literature and discourse. This is a mistake. Stigmatizing language perpetuates the stigma attached to obesity and that stigma interferes with objectivity. It also gets in the way of scientific progress because bias has an insidious effect on the quality of science.
Ximena Ramos Salas chairs Bias 180, a global nonprofit working on ways to eliminate bias, stigma, and discrimination in health and most notably in obesity. She explains the subtle importance of non-stigmatizing language for obesity:
“Person-first language is a practical expression of person-centred care. Person-centred care is evidence based. It improves adherence, outcomes, and trust because it treats patients as active decision makers with values, preferences, and social contexts.
“When health professionals dismiss person-first language and neglect to use it, they are not just rejecting words – they are undermining the same values that support shared decision making and equitable care (i.e., person-centred care).
“They are implicitly rejecting a model of care that treats people as participants rather than problems to manage. Further, they are ignoring decades of research linking respectful language to better engagement and outcomes.”
Weight bias and obesity stigma are deeply ingrained, everywhere we turn in health and health systems. Disrupting it and erasing it requires effort. That effort includes attention to the subtle expressions of it that creep into the language we use about obesity.
Thus, every one of us has a choice to make. Either we accept and perpetuate these expressions of bias. Or we make the effort to change it – even though it can be uncomfortable.
Click here for the new perspective paper by Kite et al and here for further perspective on overcoming weight bias in healthcare systems.
In the Garden of Infinite Choice, painting by Jeremy Henderson, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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January 5, 2026
