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Panelists:
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By Dené K. Dryden
According to the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, as of 2017, 42% of American adults were considered obese. However, that percentage is based on the body mass index, or BMI, a measurement tool that originally wasn’t meant for medical use. BMI was just one of many factors brought this discussion on the varying health outcomes of weight, dieting and weight stigma.
Tara Haelle opened the panel by acknowledging the different perspectives and nuances in discussions about weight, including the many terms used to refer to body size: obesity, overweight, plus-sized, adiposity, fat, excess weight, etc.. Then, she laid out some statistics to ground the conversation, notably that 8 million Americans suffer from an eating disorder and that many Americans falsely believe that people that fatness is solely the result of personal choices and an inability to lose weight due to a lack of willpower.
Lynn Rossy tackled those common assumptions head-on; she spoke about people’s direct efforts to lose weight, diets, and how they can negatively affect one’s health.
“One of the latest research reviews of 14 popular weight loss diets of 121 randomized trials showed that there was short-term benefit, but long-term diets fail,” Rossy said. “You have an increased risk of eating disorders, body image dissatisfaction, increased inflammation, which leads to increase in weight and weight cycling.”
Rossy asked journalists to be mindful of bias and shame against fat people and to avoid reporting on new weight loss medications or diets through the lens of being the solution for fat people.
Dr. Susan Reeds presented a differing perspective on weight and weight loss. While Rossy said that obesity is not a disease, Reeds said it is, and treating obesity as such could help reduce shame and stigma by underlining the fact that fatness isn’t due to personal fault or laziness.
“There are hundreds of contributing factors,” Reed said. “Factors that go back to epigenetics, your mom’s eating habits while she was pregnant with you, your microbiome. … External factors that [are] some of the really important ones, too, are societal factors.
“Talking about obesity, again, it’s nuanced,” Reed continued. “The most important thing is to respect people … but recognizing that approaching it [obesity] as a disease can actually help reduce stigma and biases societally and in the individual.”
Narrowing in on how fat people are treated in the media, Pamela Mejia shared the results of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance’s “The Size of It” study, which took a close look at how journalists cover news related to weight. Mejia’s research for NAAFA found that the terms “obese” and “obesity” were more commonly used than “fat,” “plus-size” or “people with larger bodies.” Articles that addressed weight stigma mostly did so in the context of anti-fat prejudice within health care.
Mejia’s takeaways for journalists: look for story angles that go beyond the release of medical research surrounding diets and weight, include fat activists as sources and avoid photo faux pas like cropping a plus-sized person’s head out of the image or using photos of larger bodies only for stories about weight.
Dené K. Dryden is the health reporter for the Rochester Post Bulletin in Rochester, Minnesota.