Posts Tagged ‘weight discrimination’

Speaking at the 13th Annual Bariatric Summit in Nashville yesterday, Ted Kyle tallied a score of three pluses and two minuses for people living with obesity under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. On the plus side of the ledger, Kyle identified three key gains: More People Have Insurance. For the first time in recent history, […]

Surveillance for obesity keeps popping up in the news this week. Caring for obesity? Not so much. The starting point was a study and commentary in Pediatrics that identified a potential problem with guidelines for universal BMI screening for childhood obesity. The problem is that once children are screened and labeled with the diagnosis of obesity, […]

Writing in the Washington Post, Tim Gunn says that designers in the fashion industry “haven’t bothered to hide their contempt” for the average American woman, who wears a size 16 or 18. Is the fashion industry reflecting a self-hating culture or creating it? For perspective, consider a new study to be published in Fashion and […]

The Obesity Action Coalition stepped forward this week to provide a better picture of living with obesity, free from bias and stigma. The OAC Image Gallery launched with 500 respectful images that can be used freely in news, social media, and educational media. By 2017, the gallery will expand to more than 4,000 images, making […]

We have a global epidemic in our midst. All over the world, people are blurting out things that they know are wrong. The latest, startling example comes from the UK National Health Service (NHS) in North Yorkshire. Last week, local administrators announced plans for explicit weight discrimination in healthcare. The plan was to make people with […]

It’s predictable. Whenever we write about weight bias, someone protests. “Why do you want to let those people off the hook?” Sometimes it comes on the form of ranting. Sometimes it’s snide humor. Most often it’s a simple comment along the lines of: “You can’t tell me it’s not their fault.” And in fact, many […]

Patient-centered puffery rules the day in health policy jargon right now. Patient-centered medical homes are all the rage. But they’re falling short of delivering a panacea for primary care. Consumer-driven health plans are popular with many employers as a means to bring consumers into healthcare decision making. The reality has involved a lot of cost shifting and […]

UThree years after the AMA decided that obesity is a chronic disease, have we seen progress in addressing obesity? Earlier this year, Arya Sharma commented that “The U.S. has made remarkable progress in policy recognition of obesity as a disease.” In a new paper to be published in Endocrinology and Metabolism Clinics, Ted Kyle, Emily […]

The Paso del Norte region of  Texas and New Mexico is home to one of the largest bilingual, binational workforces in western hemisphere. But new survey research from the Paso del Norte Institute for Healthy Living (IHL) suggests that weight bias plays a role in job opportunities where these two cultures work so closely together. The IHL research found that […]

MYOB – the classic advice to stop giving unsolicited advice – seems to have fallen out of daily conversations. Or so it would seem when the subject is someone else’s health and weight. Right now social media is all atwitter over how skinny or fat plus-size model Ashley Graham is. Last week, she posted a photo of herself […]