Posts Tagged ‘blame and shame’

It will be hard to ignore: This is an election year. So our very political health secretary, RFK Jr., is making a pivot. It turns out that making polio and measles great again is not resonating well with voters. Much of the public hates his vaccine policies. On the other hand, yelling at people to […]

It is taking a long time for diet culture to fade into oblivion. But we are well down that road when celebrity culture meets obesity science in a new book by Oprah Winfrey and Ania Jastreboff. It’s remarkable, really, that we have come to a time when one of the most iconic persons in the […]

A new study in Lancet suggests that we are overdue for fresh thinking about early childhood obesity prevention. This is because programs built upon a premise of engaging parents in the effort turn out to be ineffective. The conclusions of this research are stark: “This study is the most comprehensive individual participant data meta-analysis in […]

Food policy advocates are sharing a music video that captures a certain way of thinking. The choruses are nothing but trash talk about obesity and food. “It’s your own damn fault,” says one verse. In the next, “a team of evil scientists through rigorous testing created the most abominable snacks.” So it draws us into […]

“It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” With this anonymous piece of wisdom in mind, it still makes sense to take a moment to look back at the trends that we hoped and expected to shape the year we complete today. So here’s a narrative report card on our 2022 trend predictions. You, […]

This is a note of gratitude to Julia Belluz. In a guest essay for the New York Times, she writes beautifully and accessibly about a great gap. It is the gap between science and popular culture in the matter of obesity. She does it while reporting on the recent Royal Society meeting about the causes […]

Looking toward a new year gives us time to think about what we want and what we don’t for our lives in the year ahead. Make no mistake, the list that follows does not come from an oracle with any assurance these things must be true. But our expectations can indeed shape our futures because […]

With great gifts come great responsibilities. It doesn’t really matter whether you get this message from biblical sources or Spiderman. The imperative is there. If you have a big platform, you better use it to serve a purpose bigger than yourself. It looks like Queen Latifah and Novo Nordisk might be using their platforms to […]

Suffering creates a vacuum. But health stigma is always ready to fill that vacuum, so blame and shame flow in and amplify the suffering. This has long been the case with obesity. We’re now seeing it come into play with COVID and even with the intersection of COVID and obesity. This is called blaming the […]

Is it helpful to use shame for health promotion? The impulse is certainly strong. Shame and blame have been consistent threads through years of grappling with the health impact of obesity. Along the same line, we’re seeing shame and blame trotted out for the unvaccinated in the U.S. as a the Delta variant produces a […]