Fat Stigma Spreads Around the Globe

What are your thoughts on this –Do you feel anger or annoyance at overweight people? Do you feel that it’s their fault and deserve no understanding or empathy?  It’s interesting reading this that it’s not just a feeling pervasive in the Anglosphere — but is becoming world wide. Is it because it represents someone out of control or does it bring out the fear that people have within themselves? Lot’s of questions —

At a time when global health officials are stepping up efforts to treat obesity as a worrisome public health threat, some researchers are warning of a troubling side effect: growing stigma against fat people.

Mario Guzman/, via European Pressphoto Agency Madonna’s Hard Candy Fitness Center in Mexico City. A Mexican public health campaign shows fat people eating greasy food.

“Of all the things we could be exporting to help people around the world, really negative body image and low self-esteem are not what we hope is going out with public health messaging,” said Alexandra Brewis, executive director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

Dr. Brewis and her colleagues recently completed a multicountry study intended to give a snapshot of the international zeitgeist about weight and body image. The findings were troubling, suggesting that negative perceptions about people who are overweight may soon become the cultural norm in some countries, including places where plumper, larger bodies traditionally have been viewed as attractive, according to a new report in the journal Current Anthropology.

The researchers elicited answers of true or false to statements with varying degrees of fat stigmatization. The fat-stigma test included statements like, “People are overweight because they are lazy” and “Some people are fated to be obese.”

…Dr. Brewis said she fully expected high levels of fat stigma to show up in the “Anglosphere” countries, including the United States, England and New Zealand, as well as in body-conscious Argentina. But what she did not expect was how strongly people in the rest of the testing sites expressed negative attitudes about weight. The results, Dr. Brewis said, suggest a surprisingly rapid “globalization of fat stigma.”