Contrary to most polls, America is not the world's most overweight nation, not by a long shot: that distinction goes to the South Pacific island of Nauru. America? It's number 20 on the list. So why the discrepancy? Dr. Esther Rothblum of San Diego State University thinks she knows the answer, which she outlined today in her invited address "It's Time to Throw Our Weight Around: The New Field of Fat Studies": Jenny Craig wants us to think we're the kings of cholesterol.
And Ms. Craig is serious about it -- after all, in 1995, she, along with Slim Fast and a raft of other diet food companies, fired the opening salvo in the War on Obesity. Now, 15 years later, Rothblum is fighting back. Dubbing her counter-offensive "Fat Studies", she is pushing back on discrimination based on body weight.
Rothblum, who teaches fat studies classes at San Diego State University, charted the downward trajectory of a typical overweight person. In their youth, obese children are often talked out of attending college. This usually limits them to service-industry jobs, which do not allow them access to good healthcare. This path, according to Rothblum, is exactly the opposite of the oft-repeated paradigm that poverty leads to weight gain; instead, it is depression, she believes, that drives overweight people into poverty.
Shame based on weight is no longer reserved for the morbidly obese. In 1998, the threshold for high cholesterol was lowered from 240 mg/dL (milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood) to 200 mg/dL. This meant that overnight, 42,500,000 more people qualified for high blood pressure and became "fat", a boon to the drug industry.
There is hope, though. Rothblum noted that as civil rights movements of the past have done, the fat rights movement is starting to move beyond academia into the mainstream: fat blogs, e-zines, and even fat yoga classes are starting to proliferate, paving the way to broader acceptance.
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