Posts Tagged ‘media’

Reality collided with fantasy last night on AMC with the premier of Dietland. It’s the story of Plum Kettle, a smart writer for a shallow teen magazine who calls herself fat and just tries to fade into the scenery. But along the way, she gets noticed by feminist terrorists who are torturing unrepentant rapists and […]

An intriguing new study from the Journal of Consumer Psychology raises the possibility that fat cartoon characters might lead kids to eat more junk food. With a hook like that, it was only a matter of time before health journalists picked up this work and translated it for public consumption. After all, the popular cartoon […]

Every picture tells a story and most often, that story is more powerful than words. Unfortunately, many of the images attached to obesity evoke hostility toward people with obesity. In research from 2014, Paula Brochu and colleagues from Yale found that “simply eliminating stigmatizing media portrayals of obesity may help reduce bias.” Likewise, Nova Hinman […]

The way bias trumps evidence in obesity treatment and policy, blissful ignorance is never in short supply. Here are three appalling examples. Celebrity “Experts.” Folks like Mehmet Oz shout out evidence-free opinions that the media publish as facts. These folks are selling only one product — themselves. But along the way, Oz routinely promotes “weight […]

Competing obesity trends fill the headlines and make it tough for people to take health reporting seriously. Here’s a sampling from just the last week. Gallup: U.S. Obesity Rate Ticks Up to 27.1% in 2013 LA Times: Obesity in Young American Children Plummets Reuters: Obesity Rates Remain High, but Stable in the U.S.   How can […]

We’ve never been a big fan of the Biggest Loser. Somehow sensationalizing and exploiting people with obesity doesn’t seem right. But the season finale this week seems to be causing even fans, perhaps even the coaches, to stop and wonder, “Is this a big mistake?” What prompted this controversy was the appearance of the winner, […]

In an ongoing skirmish about healthy body images with fashion publications, Jezebel recently overreached and caused some to wonder, “Is this issue becoming moot?” Jezebel offered a $10,000 bounty for unretouched photos of Lena Dunham taken for Vogue, saying “her body is real” but the images of her in Vogue are “probably not terribly real.” After […]

An obesity paradox is like catnip for the media — unfortunately. And so various forms of obesity paradox have been in the news lately. Here are three examples getting a lot of attention. Diabetes Obesity Paradox. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine this week debunked the notion that people with excess weight and […]

Chris Christie’s weight just might be an asset in his quest to advance his political career. Smug pundits may be completely wrong when they talk about his weight as a liability. Here are three ways it can help. Distraction. Right now Christie needs a distraction — anything will do — to move on from the […]

Weight bias is getting four kinds of critical public attention that gives hope we’re turning a corner on this problem. Increasingly it’s being called out as unacceptable fat shaming. A quick look at Google Trends shows you that 2012 was the year people started taking notice of “fat shaming.” Before That it simply didn’t show […]