• Do you think it’s possible to combat obesity without stigmatizing obese people?

Why or why not? With great publicity, the U.S. government launched a national campaign against the rising problem of childhood obesity, including specifi c recommendations for addressing the problem and an ambitious goal of reducing the childhood obesity rate by 75% within 20 years. Concern over obesity has reached a high point, with books such as Fast Food Nation and fi lms such as Supersize Me criticizing the fastfood industry, schools banning the sale of soft drinks and snack foods, and watchdog groups monitoring how food is marketed to children. While these are all welcome developments that help to raise awareness of the dangers of obesity, especially in children, there also has been an unintended consequence: stigma toward the obese

(Benac, 2010).

Researcher Alexandra Brewis and her colleagues at Arizona State University surveyed people in 10 different locales around the world, asking them whether they agreed with a number of statements that expressed a variety of positive and negative beliefs about overweight people, such as “people are overweight because they are lazy” or “a big woman is a beautiful woman.” The cultures where people were surveyed included body-conscious ones such as the United States, England, New Zealand, and Argentina, as well as ones that have historically held heavier people in high esteem, such as Puerto Rico and American Samoa (Brewis et al., 2011).

Brewis confi rmed strong negative attitudes toward overweight people in the nations where she expected to fi nd it. But she also found high levels of this fat stigma in the other locales as well, including nations that once favored big bodies. Not only does it seem that people had become less tolerant of obesity, but also they were more inclined to see obese others as being to blame for their condition. It seems that public health messages intended to encourage people to take control of their weight may be inadvertently implying that obesity is caused by the individual’s lack of self-control, downplaying important social and environmental factors that contribute to the problem.