Should obesity be recontextualised as a “chronic relapsing progressive disease process”, with food as the “pathological agent”? Yes, says the World Obesity Federation in a new position statement, casting it in an epidemiological light. No, say those of us who see this as deeply problematic language.
Such an approach only worsens the already rigid medicalisation of obese bodies, which risks weight and size eclipsing other factors when assessing health. Legitimate medical issues can get missed in lieu of a blinkered fixation on body shape.
It is also dehumanising and fuels a wider discourse on obesity riddled with unhelpful moralising and public shaming. Fatphobia is endemic in many societies, from the distorted ways in which bigger bodies are represented in the media to an imperative to shame and scold the obese.
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Linking a particular physical form to disease risks attracting yet more stigma that, aside from being cruel, is fundamentally counterintuitive: fat shaming has not just proved unhelpful in assisting weight loss, but can actively contribute to weight gain.
This disease debate is far from new. Whether obesity should be classified this way has been discussed for over 100 years. Indeed, the new statement cites an argument from 1923 that diseases are simply “abstract concepts created by the human mind” – so why not obesity?
Food associations
This is all troubling. As is the casting of food as a “toxic” agent.
“Food is the principal environmental agent for obesity,” asserts the statement. “Tasty, low cost, convenient foods.” The problem is that the wider vocabulary surrounding food has never been more fallaciously medicalised than it is today. This has been perpetuated via the “wellness” movement, which in a relatively recent slew of cookbooks has claimed food as a means to tackle a plethora of illnesses.
Bestselling cookbook , by Jasmine and Melissa Hemsley, was informed by the GAPS diet – a hokey regimen that claims to treat autism and diabetes. One of the biggest names in the new wave of eating advice, Ella Woodward (author of the bestselling cookbooks), said that eliminating processed and refined foods and eating more plant-based products helped her , where medication had failed.
Equating food to a pathogen risks lending more weight to a pseudoscientific culture that assigns medical powers to what we eat. This often manifests as gluten is toxic, carbohydrates are junk, burgers are dirty. The flip side is that certain types of food are evangelised as “clean” and “light”.
You see the problem with getting into these language associations? Clean: pure, good. Dirty: diseased, bad. Eating certain types of food becomes an illicit act that is implicitly shameful and guilt-ridden.
And that will get us nowhere.
Journal reference: Obesity Reviews, DOI:
