America is ridiculously fat. That’s not even been a surprise for years; 36 percent of the adult U.S. population is obese, a proportion that’s expected to rise to 42 percent by 2030, according to new reports out this week. There’s at least a bright side to the bad news: after 30 years of record growth in the number of obese Americans, the pace is beginning to slow. (If we stayed at our old pace, more than half the country would be obese by 2030.) So while it seems that healthier offerings from restaurants, education campaigns, and maybe even high gas prices forcing people to walk have helped, we’re still having a lot of trouble stemming the tide of our growing waistlines.Finding the solution is the trillion dollar question, considering that obesity-related health complications promise to increasingly burden our cash-strapped healthcare system. Sharon Begley, writing an excellent report for Reuters, suggests that one of the things we need most to change is our collective perception of the overweight. From the story:The stigmatization of obesity begins in preschool: Children as young as 3 tell scientists studying the phenomenon that overweight people are mean, stupid, ugly and have few friends. It intensifies in adulthood, when substantial numbers of Americans say obese people are self-indulgent, lazy and unable to control their appetites. And it translates into poorer job prospects for the obese compared with their slim peers.
It may be the nation’s last, accepted form of prejudice. But the stigmatization of obesity has repercussions beyond the pain it inflicts on its targets: It threatens to impede efforts to fight the obesity epidemic.
“As long as we have this belief that obese people are lazy and lacking in discipline, it will be hard to get support for policies that change the environment, which are likely to have a much larger impact than trying to change individuals,” said psychologist Rebecca Puhl of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.Begley offers a smart take on the question of environment versus willpower when it comes to our health. We know that willpower is an extremely limited resource, and thus, if we really want to tackle the obesity epidemic, we must balance education and exercise programs with smart policy choices that help us when we’re at our weakest. And Begley notes that there is support for this: A Reuters poll showed that “56 percent [of respondents] wanted to limit advertising of unhealthy food or taxing sugared soda, 77 percent were in favor of calorie counts at restaurants and sport arenas.”Of course, in that same poll, a whopping 61 percent of respondents blamed personal choices (like poor diet and lack of exercise) for the obesity epidemic; only 19 percent blamed the food industry. That type of stigma — the thought that people are fat because they’re lazy, not because of fundamental issues with our food system — is hurting the effort to change policy.Look at it this way: Fast food is not the only problem, but it is a problem. Banning, while probably extreme, would almost surely have a positive effect on our collective weight, which would go a long way to lowering health care costs for all of us. But we don’t see fast food as the problem; instead, we blame overweight people’s inability to say no. More common-sense policy approaches, like taxing soda — we already tax smokes and booze, right? — also get cast by the wayside.That stigma affects individuals in other ways. Depression and even an occasional bummer feeling from some jerk calling you fat can lead to unhealthy binge eating. It’s been shown that overweight patients sometimes delay getting medical care, even routine procedures, for fear of embarrassment and judgement from doctors. This also leads to people doing anything to avoid acknowledging the problem. In the Reuters poll, 26 percent of respondents were obese according to their provided height and weight, but only 14 percent actually stated that they were.When it comes down to it, name-calling and prejudice isn’t going to solve the obesity epidemic. Knowledge of the issue and smart responses will, which means we all have to be willing to admit the roots of the problem and work towards solutions. And don’t forget, whether you’re overweight or not, you’re already wrapped into it; the same report that showed the nation will be 42 percent obese by 2030 stated that the additional health care costs of those newly obese will add up to $550 billion over the next 20 years. With that in mind, can we really afford to keep playing the blame game? Definitely not.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.
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