What's Wrong With Fat? by Abigail C. Saguy

Author:Abigail C. Saguy [Saguy, Abigail C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health & Fitness, Medicine, Public Health, Social Sciences, Health Care
ISBN: 9780199857081
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

Another way in which we measured attitudes about weight and health was by showing respondents computer-generated images of women in bikinis at various body sizes and asking them whether they thought it was possible to be healthy at that size. They could respond either “yes” or “no.” We found striking differences for the image of a woman with a BMI of about 34 (at the top of the “obese 1” category). In Experiment 1, only 27 percent of the participants who read the personal responsibility and public health crisis articles agreed that this woman could be healthy, compared to 65 percent of those having read the health and any size and fat rights articles.

Testing the effect of these frames separately and comparing them to a control, in Experiment 2, provided additional insights. Only 36 percent of people who read the personal responsibility articles and a mere 15 percent of those who read the public health crisis articles agreed that the woman could be healthy. In comparison, a whopping 82 percent of those having read the fat rights articles said that it was possible to be healthy at that weight. Those having read the health at every size and control articles fell in the middle at 59 and 57 percent, respectively. The lack of effect of the health at every size frame is puzzling and suggests that this position, while questioning that it is not necessarily unhealthy to be fat, does not present fatness as good. In contrast, the fat rights frame’s more radical claim to fatness as positive seems to shift attitudes more.

ANTI-FAT BIAS, DISCRIMINATION AND CELEBRATION OF BODY SIZE DIVERSITY

Fat rights activists and health at every size advocates worry that a medical and public health crisis framing of fat will worsen weight-based stigma and discrimination. Our experiments provide empirical support for this concern. We used a variety of different attitudinal measures, including many developed by other researchers, to capture the expression of anti-fat bias and discrimination. 12 We also measured support for body diversity by asking relative agreement with three statements: (1) “People should embrace the idea that ‘big is beautiful’”; (2) “We should celebrate fatness and the diversity in people’s body size”; and (3) “It is morally wrong to pressure fat people to lose weight if they don’t want to.” As with the other attitudinal measures, respondents were asked whether they agreed with each of these statements, on a scale of 1 to 9, where 1 represented strongly disagree and 9 represented strongly agree.

In Experiments 3 and 4, we asked participants to read either a news report on the Eating-to-Death study, on the Fat-OK study, or a control article about cancer mortality that made no reference to body weight. The news report on the Eating-to-Death study framed fatness as a public health crisis: “Obesity is near to overtaking smoking as the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, government researchers said on Tuesday, and other research shows that its adverse health effects could soon wipe out many recent improvements in health.

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