Posts Tagged ‘public opinion’

At the 2017 European Congress on Obesity yesterday, ConscienHealth’s Ted Kyle presented data on contrasting views of obesity in Europe. These views provide a window into bias about obesity and people who have it. From a sample of 34,320 adults in Sweden, UK, Germany, and Italy, a fascinating picture emerges. Belief that obesity results from addiction to […]

Why are we living with so much obesity? If you ask the public, this question has different answers in different cultures. New data, being presented today at the Canadian Obesity Summit in Banff, suggests that addictive junk food is an especially popular explanation for the problem – especially with Brazilians and French Canadians. Different Beliefs in Brazil, […]

If you want some understanding of why sensible food policy is so hard, study the results of new opinion research by the Pew Research Center. Researchers Cary Funk and Brian Kennedy find that beliefs about healthy food, more than education and facts, shape the way that people think about questions: These choices reflect personalized “ideologies” […]

New research to be presented at ObesityWeek 2016 indicates that weight shaming may be easing a bit. At the same time, the public increasingly understands that obesity is a medical condition. Between 2013 and 2016, public perception of obesity as a “personal problem of bad choices” has dropped from 44% to 34%. On top of that, […]

Novelist Sarai Walker proclaimed in the New York Times this weekend: “Yes, I’m fat. It’s OK. I said it.” Her commentary immediately started trending and it made us wonder, is “fat” losing its sting as an offensive insult? Fat acceptance activists, after all, have accomplished much. As we’ve written before, many signs can be found […]

Remember Ebola? That was so 2014. But with that problem solved, Americans are turning their attention back to obesity, which is again at the top of the list of the most urgent health concerns for adults in the U.S. This insight comes to us courtesy of the Gallup Organization, which has been polling the public about their […]

In a somewhat surprising outcome, Rebecca Puhl and Sai Liu have found substantial evidence of public support for the 2013 AMA decision to classify obesity as a complex, chronic disease. The majority of a robust national sample of 1,118 of U.S. adults agreed with 11 of 17 reasons favoring classification of obesity as a disease and agreed with […]

Obesity sits atop the list of diseases that Americans worry about. (We’ll set aside the matter of Ebola for now.) And yet people have a hard time wrapping their heads around obesity as a disease. Some equate obesity with BMI or body size and protest that BMI can’t be a disease. Others say obesity is […]

Obesity, weight, and diet are the top personal health concerns of Americans according to a national survey of 1,219 adults conducted by Hart Research Associates in June and released Friday by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association. The study also identified obesity as one of the top three health research priorities for Americans. Overall as […]

American public opinion is clear that obesity is a health problem that needs to be addressed, but opinions on obesity solutions are mixed. In a recent poll of 1,000 adults fielded by Associated Press/NORC for Public Affairs Research, 75% of people say having excess weight and obesity is an extremely or very serious problem. Excess […]