Posts Tagged ‘anti-fat bias’

In Health Affairs: Obesity Care Is Preventive Care

July 14, 2024 — It is hard not to think we are seeing a subtle shift in prevailing bias about obesity. Almost a decade ago, Health Affairs saw merit in publishing projections to say that taxes and other restrictions on unhealthy foods and beverages were more important than providing medical care for children with obesity. The argument was that […]

Words That Betray Implicit Bias About Obesity

June 11, 2022 — “This is a cane that’s going to help you walk. But you’re going to have to do the walk yourself.” This is how Dr. Zhaoping Li explains why she prescribes anti-obesity medicines to patients only after lifestyle changes have failed. But words like failure betray an implicit bias about obesity. They contradict the understanding of […]

Obesity: How Does a Diagnosis Become a Slur?

April 17, 2022 — Obesity is a slur. This statement framed the opening to a recent symposium at the UC Berkeley School of Public health. The subject was weight inclusive public health. The goal was dialogue to address systemic anti-fatness and racism embedded in public health, medicine, and the food system. It’s a lot. On one hand a caricature of […]

The Invisible Endemic of Hateful Bone Disease

February 20, 2022 — The hate crimes trial of three White men in Georgia who chased down and killed a Black man when he ran through their neighborhood is coming to an end. Mercifully, we have not had to listen to any of them testify that they don’t have a racist or hateful bone in their body. But let’s […]

Delegating Bias and Discrimination to Computer Systems

January 1, 2022 — Should 2022 be the year that we turn over decision making to artificial intelligence? Writing in the Washington Post, Steven Zeitchik suggests it should. We could banish fears of making bad decisions, he says. But we beg to differ. A growing body of evidence tells us that computer systems can replicate the bad decisions we […]

Obesity Policy to Promote Stigma

December 4, 2021 — Recent analyses of health policy on obesity present a rather stark picture. Policies aimed at obesity have done more to promote stigma than health. The focus on individuals has not changed for decades, say James Nobles and his colleagues. In fact, they found that 58 percent of research aimed to prove that educating individuals to […]

Is Intolerance a Problem or a Virtue?

October 3, 2021 — “Child abuse.” When we wrote earlier this week about new data on bariatric surgery in children with severe obesity, that was one visceral response. Ten years ago, Lindsey Murtagh and David Ludwig trotted out the child abuse label with precisely opposite reasoning. They suggested that parents of children with obesity might be guilty of abuse […]

Public Health Policy That Harms More Than Helps

June 24, 2021 — Writing in the Lancet, Janet Treasure and Suman Ambwani have a simple request. Public health policy should stop promoting weight stigma. The request is simple, but it may not be easy. For decades now, public health has often focused on promoting fear of fat, rather than the pursuit of health. The result is health policy […]

Semaglutide and “The Answer” to Obesity

February 26, 2021 — “Medical care is nice, but it’s surely not the answer to obesity. Behaviors matter.” These words came to us from the audience of a webinar for a regional business group on health. Oddly enough, those words came on the same day that JAMA published yet another major study on semaglutide for treating obesity. Two weeks […]