The War on Weight

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At the conference, Hillary Clinton, putative front-runner for the Democratic party's 2008 presidential nomination, thundered, "We are conducting a massive experiment on our kids, and parents have not given their consent."

However, Yancey believes there is more to do before legislation. "The food industry is saying, 'This is a matter of individual choice, and we provide all the different choices,' while at the same time they are marketing most heavily the nastiest choices — the lowest nutrient value and the highest fat-sugar-whatever-the-hell-it-is that we don't need to be consuming. So there is disingenuousness there, but, at the same time, we are conflicted as a people. We don't want to stigmatize fat, but we do. We want to eat whatever we want to eat, but we don't want to gain weight."

And there's even a deeper level in the fight over fat. L.A. journalist Greg Critser M.A. '83, author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People In the World says that the words "fat" and "obesity" have taken on a sociocultural charge that muddies the waters when discussing solutions. "A newspaper in England called me recently asking if I thought that 'fat' had become the new 'race' in our public dialogue," Critser says. "I think it is … only in the sense that it becomes a proxy for talking about other things nobody wants to talk about."

Things like class and gender disparities, contends Yancey. Women in general have higher rates of obesity, and women of color have even higher rates, for instance. "When you have 75 percent of the white population that is middle class or above and only a third of the black population that is middle class or higher, and similar numbers for Latinos and recent Asian immigrants like Cambodians, then you are talking about people who are existing within very resource-constrained circumstances," she says. "Fat is also a proxy in this country for poverty, for lack of opportunity, for basically all the kinds of things that create health disparities and inequities."

UCLA Assistant Sociology Professor Abigail Saguy is one researcher particularly interested in the social politics of fat, warning that viewing the phenomenon uniquely through a clinical, medical lens limits our understanding of it. Obesity becomes, she believes, a funnel through which the society expresses inchoate worries — for instance, rather than address unease with changing gender roles, we talk about working mothers not taking the time to prepare healthy meals.

Published Oct 1, 2006 12:00 AM