The source document here is a podcast transcript that combines the best features of two genres. The official title is “Fatness and the Body – Episode 2: Being fat or having obesity: combining social constructivism and biomedical research on childhood obesity.” On the other hand, much of the content is less like a scientific paper and more like talking with an erudite friend, in the quietest corner of a Saturday night house party.
The scholarly content comes from Adam Mickiewicz University, a research center which, under various administrations and with a few name changes, has existed in Poznan, Poland, since 1611. This episode is part of a larger program, Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity. Author Zofia Boni is absolutely tireless in her pursuit of both usable facts and of ways to present them to the concerned public.
It’s multifactorial
Her academic career has emphasized anthropology, socialist studies, feminist scholarship, epidemiology, climate science, demography, and other areas of interest, all to capture the big picture regarding childhood obesity. She notes that for children and youth, typical BMI calculations are not used, but rather percentiles and databases correlated to the child’s sex…
[…] and either according to the WHO standards, you can end up with around 30% of 8 year olds in Poland having overweight and obesity, or if you end up using the standards which are the oldest ones, then it’s around 20%… And among those numbers, it is assumed that around 3 to 4% are children with obesity.
In other words, “overweight” and “obesity” are shifty characters who refuse to stand still and have their pictures taken for the record. Boni recommends a viewpoint outside the North America-centric one, from which to gaze at the past decade or so from the perspective of a European graduate student asking questions about the distinction between obesity and fatness, which is always awkward terrain both methodologically and ethically. Furthermore, why does the distinction even matter, and not incidentally, who gets to decide?
Two faces
Boni, the excellent student, is comfortable seeking facts, precision, and certainty; while at the same time, it is almost as if someone else’s brain shares her skull:
So what I want to take from those perspectives in my own future research is on the one hand, recognizing that fatness is alright, so that people are thin and fat as they are small and tall, and not pathologizing or stigmatizing it, but then also recognizing that obesity has very troubling health consequences and physical and physiological consequences. And that there is such a disease as obesity. This is in a way connected I guess, but not every fat person has obesity, right?
Throughout years of research, the author has concentrated on two questions: How and why did obesity make the shift from being chiefly a personal problem, all the way to becoming a matter of public concern? And how do actual people, especially children, experience not only obesity, but the role of public enemy into which some factions of society often try to cast them?
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Fatness and the Body’ Episode 2,” Podcasts.ox.ac.uk
Image by RaniRamli/Pixabay
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